Tagphish

Thinking about filters

Much of the current deliverability advice focuses on a few key ideas: Authenticate your mail with SPF, DKIM and DMARC Use a dedicated IP. Monitor delivery. Clean your data. All of these things are absolutely things you should be doing, but senders can do all these things and still have cruddy delivery. These things are great and can help your mail deliver better. But they’re not enough to...

Email is inherently a malicious traffic stream

It’s something many people don’t think about, but the majority of the traffic coming into the SMTP port is malicious. Spam is passively malicious, in that it just uses resources and bothers people. But there is a lot of actively malicious traffic coming into the SMTP port. Email is used as a vector to spread viruses and other malware. Email is also used for phishing and scamming. Many...

Spam, Phish or Malware?

Some mornings I check mail from my phone. This showed up this morning. My first thought was “oh, no, Pizza Hut is spamming, wonder who sold them my address.” Then I remembered that iOS is horrible and won’t show you anything other than the Friendly From and maybe it was some weird phishing scheme. When I got to my real mail client I checked headers, and sure enough, it...

CNN warns about Target copy-cat phishes

Target did indeed do a blast to customers to offer one year of free credit monitoring. The problem is scammers are also on the prowl and are sending out similar emails. Target even says it has identified and stopped at least 12 scams preying on consumers via email, Facebook and other outlets.CNN: Did you get an email from Target? I’m not surprised in the least that phishers are copy-catting...

Return Path partners with Symantec

Today Return Path announced a partnership with Symantec to improve their anti-phishing product. Return Path is incorporating the Symantec Trusted Domain List into their authentication and filtering product to help customers protect their brands. Press Release Phishing scams affect everyone, and having a brand that is used in phishing can reduce consumer trust in that brand. Protecting brands in...

Email attacks

Ken has an article up today about the ongoing attacks against ESPs and email marketers. In it he says: Someone in permission-based email marketing should have sounded the alarm about the wedding-photo attacks months before Blumberg did. The attacks were being talked about on at least 2 different private lists. One made up primarily of email marketers and most of them didn’t seem to take it...

Blocked for phishing

A couple clients recently have had bounces from different places indicating that their mails were caught by the recipients’ anti-virus filter. These are some of my better clients sending out daily newsletters. They’ve been mailing for years and I know that they are not phishing. They asked me to investigate the bounce messages. The information I had to work with was minimal. One...

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