Spamhaus has mostly mitigated the dDOS against the Spamhaus website and mailserver, but now the CBL is under attack. They have been working to get that under protection as well, but it’s taking some time. Right now there are no public channels for delisting from the CBL. The Spamhaus Blog will be updated as things change, and I’ll try and keep things updated here as well. UPDATE:...
Late last night I, and a number of other folks, received mail from Spamhaus informing us of a major denial of service attack against their servers. The attack is so bad that the website and main mailserver is currently offline. DNS services, including rsync and the mirrors, are up and running. Spamhaus is working to bring the mailserver and website back up, and are hoping to have it up later...
There’s been a lot of discussion about Spamhaus, spam traps, and blocking. Today, Spamhaus rep Denny Watson posted on the Spamhaus blog about some of the recent large retailer listings. He provides us with some very useful information about how Spamhaus works, and gives 3 case studies of recent listings specifically for transactional messages to traps. The whole thing is well worth a read...
A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts. First, let’s look at what Spamhaus has to say. Initially they listed the...
In the US, the law governing the sending of commercial email is CAN SPAM. I’ve seen a number of questions about CAN SPAM recently. One came from twitter, where someone was asking if just having an email address meant permission to send to it. Clearly, just being able to dig up an email address doesn’t imply permission to send marketing or commercial email to it. I can promise you...
I got mail late last night from one of the Spamhaus peeps telling me that they were under a distributed Denial of Service (dDOS) attack. This is affecting email. Incoming email is delayed and they’re having difficulty sending outgoing email. This is affecting their responses to delisting queries. They are working on mitigation and hopefully will be fully up and running soon. Updates when I...
Ken Magill wrote about Spamhaus last week. In the article he commented about the volunteers. By most accounts, the folks responsible for maintaining Spamhaus’s blacklists can be a very annoying group to deal with—mainly because they’re faceless and unforgiving. Today, Ken published a response from Steve Linford, the head of Spamhaus. The response is well worth a read and I encourage you to head...
URL shorteners, like bit.ly, moby.to and tinyurl.com, do three things: Make a URL shorter Track clicks on the URL Hide the destination URL Making URLs shorter was their original role, and it’s why they’re so common in media where the raw URL is visible to the recipient – instant messaging, twitter and other microblogs, and in plain text email where the “real” URL...
Today’s been chock full of phone calls and dealing with clients, but I did happen to notice a bunch of people having small herds of cows because Spamhaus listed www.gmail.com on the SBL. “SPAMHAUS BLOCKS GOOGLE!!!” the headlines scream. My own opinion is that Google doesn’t do enough to police their network and their users, and that a SBL listing isn’t exactly a...
“If you do stupid things, you’re going to get blocked,” says Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler in an interview with Ken Magill earlier this week. Jigsaw is a company that rewards members to input their valuable business contacts. Once the addresses are input into Jigsaw, they are sold to anyone who wants them. Jigsaw gets the money, the people providing information get… something, the...
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