“What would you do for 25% more sales?” It’s panicked gift-buying season, and I got mail this morning from Boutique Academia, part of their final push before Christmas. They’re hoping for some Christmas sales in the next three days. They do make some lovely jewelry – ask Laura about her necklace some time – so I clicked on their mail. That’s not good. I...
One of these things is just like the other Canonicalization is about comparing things to see if they’re the same. Sometimes you want to do a “fuzzy” comparison, to see if two things are interchangeable for your purposes, even if they’re not exactly identical. As a concrete example, these two email addresses: (Steve) steve@wordtothewise.com “Also Steve”...
If you’re sharing sensitive computer security information it’s important to know how sensitive a document is, and who you can share it with. US-CERT and many other security organizations use Traffic Light Protocol as shorthand for how sensitive the information in a document is. It’s simple and easy to remember with just four colour categories: Red, Amber, Green and White. If...
It’s not often spammers send me their campaign statistics, but on Tuesday one did. The spam came “from” news@udemy.com, used udemy.com in the HELO and message-ids and, sure enough, was advertising udemy.com: Received: from udemy.com (unknown [198.20.115.217]) by ... From: Udemy <news@udemy.com> Subject: The Photoshop Secret - Master Adobe Photoshop like a Pro...
ARC – Authenticated Received Chain – is a way for email forwarders to mitigate the problems caused by users sending mail from domains with DMARC p=reject. It allows a forwarder to record the DKIM authentication as they receive a mail, then “tunnel” that authentication on to the final recipient. If the final recipient trusts the forwarder, then they can also trust the...
Google is disabling support for email sent using version 3 of SSL or using the RC4 cypher. They’re both very old – SSLv3 was obsoleted by TLS1.0 in 1999, and RC4 is nearly thirty years old and while it’s aged better than some cyphers there are multiple attacks against it and it’s been replaced with more recent cyphers almost everywhere. Google has more to say about it on...
Mail.ru is switching to p=reject. This means that you should special-case mail.ru wherever … Actually, no. Time to change that script. If you operate an ESP or develop mailing list software you should be checking whether the email address that is being used in the From: address of email you’re sending is in a domain that’s publishing p=reject (is a “rejective” email...
Zurb announced today version 2 of “Foundation for Email”, a full stack for designing content for responsive email. It looks rather nice, with features a modern web developer might look for when working on email content. It has many of the things you’d expect a web design stack to have. It support SASS for styling, includes browser sync for previewing content as it’s...
I talked on Monday about the SPF rule of ten and how it made it difficult for companies to use multiple services that send email on their behalf. Today I’m going to look at how to fix things, by shrinking bloated SPF records. This is mostly aimed at those services who send email on their customers behalf and ask their customers to include an SPF record as that’s the biggest pain...
Some mechanisms and modifiers (collectively, “terms”) cause DNS queries at the time of evaluation, and some do not. The following terms cause DNS queries: the “include”, “a”, “mx”, “ptr”, and “exists” mechanisms, and the “redirect” modifier. SPF implementations MUST limit the total number of those terms to 10...
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