Tagemail

November 9, 2019

ESP being phished is a Black Friday cataclysm

By laura

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09November

There is currently a phishing attack against a major ESP. The mail came through what I presume was a compromised account hosted at one of the providers. It’s just as possible this was a domain set up for the sole purpose of phishing, though. The underlying attack is pretty good. They took the ESP compliance notification email and changed a couple of the links to point to their phishing page...

November 5, 2019

Identifying domains that don’t accept or send email

By laura

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05November

A couple folks have asked me recently about MX records that they don’t understand. These records consist of a single . or they contain localhost or they are 127.0.0.1. In all cases, the domain owners use these records to signal that the domains don’t accept email. What do these records look like? Why do domains do this? In all cases it’s because the domain owners want to signal...

May 20, 2019

Techdirt lawsuit settled

By laura

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20May

Back in 2017 Techdirt wrote a series of articles about Shiva Ayyadura. Shiva claims he invented email. (narrator voice: he didn’t). I wrote about the lawsuit when it was dismissed on First Amendment grounds. The parties cross appealed, and have been in settlement talks for 18 months. According to Techdirt, the non-monetary settlement they agreed to is that all the articles in dispute will...

November 19, 2018

Send Actual SMTP

By laura

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19November

It’s rare I find mail that violates the SMTP spec (rfc5321 and rfc5322). I’ve even considered removing “send mail from a correctly configured mail server” from my standard Best Practices litany. But today I got mail asking me to respond to a survey. This whole email is a mess of problems, and it’s claiming to be from the California Secretary of State.  It’s...

November 16, 2018

Email addiction survey

By laura

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16November

The great folks over at Zettasphere and Emailmonday have released their Email Addiction Survey. Nothing surprising in the data that I can see, although I suspect one particular data point is going to surprise folks. Yup, more than 70% of people don’t really care about a do not reply address in a message. Honestly, I’m not surprised. Most users don’t really care. In all honesty...

September 6, 2017

Who didn't invent email, part 2

By laura

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06September

Back in 2014, Steve wrote an article discussing Shiva Ayyadurai,and his claims that he was the inventor of email. In that article he links to a number of articles from Techdirt. Earlier this year, Shiva sued Floor64, the parent company of Techdirt, as well as Michael Massnick the Founder, CEO and editor and Leigh Beadon, a writer for Techdirt. (Original Complaint pdf from ReCAP). Ars Technica has...

January 3, 2017

Happy New Year!

By laura

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03January

Well, we mostly survived 2016. A year ago I was making predictions about how 2016 would be the year of email security. I was thinking of things like TLS and authentication and access to the inbox. It wasn’t out of the question, Gmail said they’d be turning on p=reject sometime mid-year. They also were suggesting that they would be putting more value on messages that aligned, even in...

October 5, 2016

September 2016: The month in email

By laura

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05October

Happy October, everyone. As we prepare to head to London for the Email Innovations Summit, we’re taking a look back at our busy September. As always, we welcome your feedback, questions, and amusing anecdotes. Seriously, we could use some amusing anecdotes. Or cat pictures.   We continued to discuss the ongoing abuse and the larger issues raised by attacks across the larger internet...

September 12, 2016

The perfect email

By laura

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12September

More and more I’m moving away from consulting on technical setup issues as the solution to delivery problems. Delivery is not about the technical perfection of a message. Spammers get the technical right all the time. No, instead, delivery is about sending messages the user wants. While looking for something on the blog I found an old post from 2011 that’s still relevant today. In...

August 16, 2016

Improving Outlook Email Display

By laura

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16August

Today Litmus announced they had partnered with Microsoft to fix many of the rendering issues with Outlook. Congrats, Litmus! This is awesome. I know a lot of folks have tried to get MS to the table to fix some of the problems with Outlook. Take a bow for getting this off the ground. According to Litmus, the partnership has two parts. A rendering bugs feedback loop New Microsoft email clients...