The US government is looking at telling ISPs how to deal with compromised customers and botnets. They’re a bit late to the party, though. Most of the major commercial ISPs have been implementing significant botnet controls for many years now. Control involves a number of different techniques, but notification has been designed into the system from day 1. “There is no need for mandated...
MAAWG and email appending
In today’s Magill Report Ken says: The only surprise in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group’s statement last week condemning email appending was that it didn’t publish one sooner. However, MAAWG’s implication that email appending can’t be accomplished without spamming is nonsense. Ken does have a point. I can come up with a number of scenarios where recipients give permission to have...
MAAWG statement on email appending
MAAWG has published their position statement on email appending. It’s pretty explicit in it’s condemnation of the practice. It is the position of MAAWG that email appending is an abusive practice. Sending email to someone who did not explicitly give informed consent for his or her email address to be used in this way is never acceptable. It will result in complaints, which only...
Holomaxx doubles down
Holomaxx has, as expected, filed a motion in opposition to the motion to dismiss filed by both Yahoo (opposition to Yahoo motion and Hotmail (opposition to Microsoft motion). To my mind they still don’t have much of an argument, but seem to believe that they can continue with this. They are continuing to claim that Microsoft is scanning email before the email gets to Microsoft (or Yahoo)...
MAAWG: Just keeps getting better
Last week was the 22nd meeting of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). While I am prohibited from talking about specifics because of the closed door nature of the group, I can say I came out of the conference exhausted (as usual) and energized (perhaps not as usual). The folks at MAAWG work hard and play even harder. I came away from the conference feeling more optimistic about email...
Prepping for MAAWG
The June MAAWG meeting is next week. Both of us are working on various projects, documents and announcements for the meeting. This means light blogging, although we’ll post public announcements as they come out.
If you’re going to MAAWG be sure to stop by and say hi!
Holomaxx status
Just for completeness sake, Holomaxx did also file an amended complaint against Microsoft. Same sloppy legal work, they left in all the stuff about Return Path even though Return Path has been dropped from the suit. They point to a MAAWG document as a objective industry standard when the MAAWG document was merely a record of a round table discussion, not actually a standards document. I...
Amendment is futile, part 2
When Yahoo filed for dismissal of the Holomaxx complaint, they ended the motion with “Amendment would be futile in this case.” The judge granted Yahoo’s motion but did grant Holomaxx leave to amend. Holomaxx filed an amended complaint earlier this month. The judge referenced a couple specific deficiencies of Holomaxx’s claims in his dismissal. Holomaxx alleges no facts in...
Back from MAAWG
Today is the first day back at work after a productive MAAWG conference. The thing I get most out of MAAWG is a greater appreciation for what a large, global force messaging is. The recent protests and uprisings around the world have relied on messaging to organize, share information and communicate. Messaging is also somewhat fragile. Thing things that make it great for strangers to interact...
Going to MAAWG
Following on from last weeks post about MAAWG, I thought I’d write a bit about actually going to MAAWG. You’re an ESP and you’ve been accepted into the organization. Now you have some decisions to make. Who should go to MAAWG from your company? Send at least one person from your compliance or abuse desk. At the very, very least send someone who sets your policies. Don’t...