I always want to say “Emails, and Opens, and Clicks… Oh My!” when I’m talking about them. We really want to understand how a mailbox provider perceives the streams of email we send them. Some of the things the provider looks at are technical and objective – is the email coming from who it claims to be coming from? Is there an attachment that contains a virus? We have...
M3AAWG published a letter to the FCC addressing the implementation of CSRIC III Cybersecurity Best Practices (pdf link) The takeaway is that of the ISPs that contribute data to M3AAWG (37M+ users), over 99% of infected users receive notification that they are infected. I hear from senders occasionally that they are not the problem, bots are the problem and why isn’t anyone addressing bots...
An ESP asked about this error message from Hotmail and what to do about it. “Bot-like” behaviour usually means the sending server is doing something that bots also do. It’s not always that they’re spamming, often it’s a technical issue. But the technical problems make the sending server look like a bot, so the ISP is not taking any chances and they’re going to...
The Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) published a Anti-botnet code of conduct for ISPs. This is a purely voluntary code for U.S. ISPs that want to mitigate the botnet threat to follow. You can download a full copy of the final report from the MAAWG website. The FCC has published a fact sheet about the report on their own website.
Mailchannels put together another post looking at spam volumes. Related to that, many people are reporting that bot levels are climbing again.
Ken Simpson, CEO of Mailchannels, was kind enough to give me permission to post their graph of spam and email volumes from September 1, 2010 through Jan 3, 2011. This chart also shows the trend of declining volumes of spam. There are some differences, though, which I think highlight how you get different pictures when looking at different data sources. For instance, the amount of real mail (blue...
I started hearing various people comment about lower spam volumes sometime in mid December. This isn’t that unusual, spam volumes are highly variable and someone is always noticing that their spam load is going up or going down. The problem is extrapolating larger trends from a small selection of email addresses. There’s too much variation between email addresses and even domains to...
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