Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home 01 May 2012 Brian McDaid of Sili Neutraceuticals sentenced to prison Email This morning I was in federal court in Philadelphia before Judge Stewart R. Dalzell for what is probably the last chapter of the Sili Neutraceuticals story. Brian McDaid was a chiropractor who ran an affiliate spam scheme in 2005-2006 for Hoodia and other weight loss nostrums. See more ... posted at: 21:34 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Email/mcdaid.trackback 31 Mar 2012 IPv6 DNS blacklists reconsidered Email I opined about a year ago that DNS blacklists wouldn't work for mail that runs over IPv6 rather than IPv4. The reason is that IPv6 has such a huge range of addresses that spammers can easily send every message from a unique IP address, which means that recipient systems will fire off a unique set of DNSBL queries for every message, which will swamp DNS caches, since they won't be able to reuse cached results from previous queries like they can for IPv4 mail. Now I'm much less sure this will be a problem, because it's not clear that DNSBL results benefit from caches now. See more ... posted at: 16:01 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Email/v6blre.trackback 05 Mar 2012 Forwarding mail for your users Email Courtesy forwards have been a standard feature of e-mail systems about as long as there have been e-mail systems. A user moves or changes jobs or something, and rather than just closing the account, the mail system forwards all the mail to the user's new address. Or a user with multiple addresses forwards them all to one place to be able to read all the mail together. Since forwarding is very cheap, it's quite common for forwards to persist for many years. Unfortunately, forwarding is yet another thing that spam has screwed up. If you just forward all the mail that arrives at a typical address, most of what you'll be forwarding is spam. From the point of view of the system you're forwarding to, you're the one sending the spam, and they're likely to block you. Fortuately, there are some ways to mitigate the damage. See more ... posted at: 21:06 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Email/forward.trackback 18 Feb 2012 How spamtraps work, maybe Email This, uh, fell off a truck. I cannot vouch for its authenticity. > Who wants to answer this one? Oh, what the heck, tell him about it. ::---- snip ---- See more ... posted at: 15:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Email/traps.trackback 07 Feb 2012 Phish or Fair? Internet It shouldn't be a big surprise to hear that phishing is a big problem for banks. Criminals send email pretending to be a bank, and set up web sites that look a lot like a bank. One reason that phishing is possible is that e-mail has no built in security, so that if a mail message comes in purporting to be from, say, accounts@bankofamerica.com, there's no easy way to tell whether the message is really from bankofamerica.com, or from a crook. Mail authentication schemes like DKIM and the new dmarc.org group use cryptographic signatures to help authenticate mail and prove that it really is from who it purports to be from. So, if the mail can authenticate the sender, the phishing problem goes away, right? See more ... posted at: 02:36 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Internet/porf.trackback

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