Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links In the past week we’ve demonstrated that the SORBS reputation data is riddled with mistakes, poor practices, security holes and operational problems, and that the quality of the end result is really too poor to be useful. What does this mean to you though? There are really two aspects:...
GFI/SORBS considered harmful, part 3
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links In the last few days we’ve talked about GFI’s lack of responsiveness, the poor quality of their reputation and blacklist data, and the interesting details of their DDoS claims. Today we’re going to look at (some of) the fundamental problems with GFI’s procedures and...
GFI/SORBS – a DDoS Intermezzo
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links I’ve been stage-managing for a production of The Nutcracker this week, so musical terminology is on my mind. In opera, the intermezzo is a comedic interlude between acts of an opera series. This comedic interlude is about the “DDoS” – a distributed denial of service...
GFI/SORBS considered harmful, part 2
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links Yesterday I talked about GFI responsiveness to queries and delisting requests about SORBS listings. Today I’m going to look at data accuracy. The two issues are tightly intertwined – a blacklist that isn’t responsive to reports of false positive listings will end up with a...
GFI/SORBS considered harmful
Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5 Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links A little over a year ago the SORBS blacklist was purchased by GFI Software. I had fairly high hopes that it would improve significantly, start behaving with some level of professionalism and competence and become a useful data source, in much the same way that the SpamCop blacklist turned...
It's not illegal to block mail
My post “We’re going to party like it’s 1996” is still getting a lot of comments from people. Based on the comments, either people aren’t reading or my premise wasn’t clear. Back in 1996 the first lawsuits were brought against ISPs to stop ISPs from blocking email. These suits were failures. Since that time, other senders have attempted to sue ISPs and lost...
Guide to resolving ISP issues
I often get a chuckle out of watching some people, who are normally on the blocking end of the delivery equation, struggle through their own blocking issues. A recent situation came up on a mailing list where someone who has very vehement opinions about how to approach her particular blocklist for delisting and that the lists policies are immutable. The company she works for is having some...
Content based filtering
A spam filter looks at many things when it’s deciding whether or not to deliver a message to the recipients inbox, usually divided into two broad categories – the behaviour of the sender and the content of the message. When we talk about sender behaviour we’ll often dive headfirst into the technical details of how that’s monitored and tracked – history of mail from...
We're gonna party like it's 1996!
Over on deliverability.com Dela Quist has a long blog post up talking about how changes to Hotmail and Gmail’s priority inbox are a class action suit waiting to happen. All I can say is that it’s all been tried before. Cyberpromotions v. AOL started the ball rolling when they tried to use the First Amendment to force AOL to accept their unsolicited email. The courts said No. Time goes...
Getting removed from an ISP block
A question came up on a mailing list about how long it typically took to resolve a spam block at an ISP. I don’t think that question actually has a single answer, as each ISP has their own, special, process. ISPA takes 5 minutes. You fill out a form, it runs through their automated system and you’re usually delisted. ISPB asks a lot of questions in their form, so it takes about 15...