Over at CircleID Aviram Jenik posts about using email addresses as identification and how that can go horribly wrong if the website does no verification. In his case, the problem is a user who has made a purchase using Aviram’s gmail address and Aviram now has access to the other users personal information. As he explains it: Most of this misguided email ranges from boring to funny, but...
Terry Zink has been posting articles about botnets as traced by Hotmail. I do not often talk about botnets as they are outside my area of expertise. They are not something I deal with, as no one who uses botnets is welcome as a client here. My clients and I, however, do have to deal with the fallout from botnets. Because of botnets, receiver ISPs are extremely suspicious of mail from any IP...
Recently there has been a massive uptick in forgeries. I have been seeing hundreds of bounce back messages, peaking at more than 1000 in an hour. I have been talking about this with people who monitor large spamtrap feeds, large MTAs and spamfilters and it seems this is not an isolated experience. The consensus seems to be that there is new spamware out there which is using email addresses on the...
I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance. “We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer...
Yesterday we talked about social networks that harvest the address books of registered users and send mail to all those addresses on behalf of their registered user. In the specific case, the registered user did not know that the network was going to send that mail and subsequently apologized to everyone. That is not the only way social networks collect addresses. After I posted that, Steve...
JD had a comment on my Valentines day semi-fluff post, that really summed up the reality for senders. He said Make sure your mail doesn’t look anything like spam — not just in the text and formatting, but in all of your mailing practices. Good advice, your mail will not be blocked if it does not look like spam. What kinds of things do I mean? Here are things that spammers do, that often non...
Late last week I heard from someone at AOL they were seeing strange traffic from a major ESP, that looked like the ESP was an open relay. This morning I received an email from AOL detailing what happened as relayed by the ESP. IronPort Open Relay Vulnerability Systems Affected IronPort A60 running software version 2.5.4-005. According to IronPort, later devices and software versions using the...
Over on the ET blog, Al posted about how CAN SPAM compliance is not sufficient for you to not be spamming. It’s a bit different perspective, but very complimentary to my post yesterday about what is and is not spam. He and I have both heard from ISP people about how many requests for whitelisting or unblocking are prefaced with, “We comply with CAN SPAM” and how meaningless that...
A few days ago I was reading the attempt by e360 and Dave Linhardt to force Comcast to accept his mail and to stop people posting in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email from claiming he is a spammer. The bit that pops out at me in this complaint of his, is the fact that he believes that by complying with the minimal standards of the CAN-SPAM act, he is not spamming. The problem with this...
Seth Godin links to a post up over on The Long Tail about spammers who send PR mail to Chris Anderson, an editor at wired. Apparently lots of people send automated email to the editor of Wired hawking their latest and greatest product, service or photos. In response to this overwhelming amount of mail, Chris has instituted a new email acceptance policy. He says So fair warning: I only want two...
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