I often pull emails into a database to analyze them, but sometimes I want something simpler. Emails are typically stored in one of two ways: mbox format, where an entire mailbox is stored in a single file, and maildir format, where a mailbox is a directory with one file in it for each email. My desktop mail application is Mail.app on OS X, and it stores messages in a maildir-ish format, so...
A number of sources are reporting this morning that there was a problem with some domains in the .com zone yesterday. These problems caused the DNS records of these domains to become corrupted. The records are now fixed. Some of the domains, however, had long TTLs. If a recursive resolver pulled the corrupted records, it could take up to 2 days for the new records to naturally age out. Folks can...
There’s been a ton of press over the last week on the denial of service attack on Spamhaus. A lot of it has been overly excited and exaggerated, probably in an effort to generate clicks and ad revenue at the relevant websites. But we’re starting to see the security and network experts talk about the attack, it’s effects and what it tells us about future attacks. I posted an...
While much of the attack against Spamhaus has been mitigated and their services and websites are currently up, the attack is still ongoing. This is the biggest denial of service attack in history, with as much as 300 gigabits per second hitting Spamhaus servers and their upstream links. This traffic is so massive, that it’s actually affecting the Internet and web surfers in some parts of...
In many cases these days, many more cases than a lot of senders want to admit, delivery problems at the big ISPs are a result of sending mail recipients just don’t care about. The reason your mail is going to bulk? It’s not because you have minor problems in your headers. It’s not because you have some formatting issues. The reason is because your recipients just don’t...
We talk a lot about rules and best practices in email, but we’re mostly talking about “squishy” rules-of-thumb that are based on simplified models of how mail systems, spam filters, recipients, postmasters and blacklist operators behave. They’re the biology, ecology and sociology of the email ecosystem. There’s another set of rules we tend to only mention in passing...
Providing tagged email addresses to vendors is fascinating, and at the same time disturbing. It lets me track what a particular email address is used for, but also to see where and when they’ve leaked to spammers. I’d really like to know who leaked an email address, and when. All my inbound mail is sorted into “spam” and “not-spam” by a combination of...
I often find myself having to analyze volumes of email, looking for common factors, source addresses, URLs and so on as part of some “forensics” work, analyzing leaked emails or received spam for use as evidence in a case. For large volumes of mail where I might want to dig down in a lot of detail or generate graphical or statistical reports I tend to use Abacus to slurp in and...
This morning, someone asked an interesting question. Last time I worked with the actual HTML design of emails (a long time ago), <head> was not really needed. Is this still true for the most part? Any reason why you still want to include <head> + meta, title tags in emails nowadays? There are several bits of information in the <head> part of an HTML document that can affect the...
Passwords are convenient for the end user, but it’s too easy to lose control of them. People share them with other people. People write them down, where they can be read. People send them in email, and that email is easily intercepted. People’s web browsers store the passwords, so they can log in automatically. Worst of all, perhaps, people tend to use the same username and password...
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