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

←2012→ Months Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Click the comments link on any story to see comments or add your own. Subscribe to this blog RSS feed

Home :: Email 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 28 Jan 2012 The state of mail database marketing Email My mail server has a lot of spamtraps. They come from various sources, but one of the most prolific is bad addresses in personal domains. Several of my users have their own domains, such as my own johnlevine.com, in which they use a handful of addresses. Those addresses tend either to be people's first names, for individual mailboxes, or else the names of companies. If I did business with Verizon (which I do not) I might give them an address like verizon@johnlevine.com. All those domains get mail to lots of other addresses, which is 100% spam. The made up addresses are largely dictionary attacks, which is obvious when I see sequential spam to barry@, betsy@, and bruno@. Some of them are company addresses that leaked to spammers before the companies went out of business years ago. And some are just mysteries. See more ... posted at: 19:48 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Email/stale.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 15 Email - 183 ICANN - 81 Internet - 22 Money - 11 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs CAUCE CRTC CASL Regulation Summary 63 days ago A keen grasp of the obvious Tourtière around the world 133 days ago Word to the Wise Delivery and marketing part 2 New! Related sites Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail IRTF Anti-Spam Research Group Network Abuse Clearinghouse

© 2005-2012 John R. Levine.
CAN SPAM address harvesting notice: the operator of this website will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by this website to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.