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


2011
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26 Dec 2011

Filtering spam at the transport level Email
An interesting new paper from the Naval Postgraduate School (paper
here, conference slides here) describes what appears to be an interesting new twist on spam filtering, looking at the characteristics of the TCP session through which the mail is delivered.

See more ...


  posted at: 23:40 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/tcpfilter.html

17 Dec 2011

Who's registering .XXX domains ICANN
ICANN has an obscure process called Zone File Access, which lets you get access to each top-level domain's zone file, which lists all of its second-level domains. I asked for access to .XXX several months ago, and my password arrived this afternoon.

See more ...


  posted at: 14:46 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/xxxzone.html

14 Dec 2011

Apparently endless free money from Capital One Money

A year and a half ago I blogged about my Capital One credit card's payment checks sent along with the monthly statement, that offered a free loan for about 45 days. Early last year I stopped because they sometimes bounce the checks even though the online statement says there's plenty of credit.

Since then, they stopped sending the checks, but I found that I could point and click on their web site and have them mail me a check, payable to me.

See more ...


  posted at: 13:20 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/freeupdate.html

07 Dec 2011

More on Greylisting still works Email
Last month I
blogged about greylisting, a well-known anti-spam technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets. When a mail server receives a an attempt to deliver mail from an IP address that's never sent mail before, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail senders always retry, badly written spamware often doesn't. I found that even though everyone knows about greylisting, about 2/3 of IPs don't successfully retry.

See more ...


  posted at: 23:13 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/grey11a.html

21 Nov 2011

A serious antitrust challenge to .XXX ICANN
Manwin Licensing is a Luxembourg company that turns out to manage a large fraction of the mainstream porn available on the Internet. They run websites including youporn.com (widely agreed to be the most popular porn site on the Net) as well as Playboy's online and TV properties. This week they and Digital Playground, a producer of porn video, sued ICANN and the ICM registry, which runs .XXX, on anti-trust grounds. In theory, .XXX was authorized by ICANN following the same rules as all of the other sponsored TLDs such as the uncontroversial .COOP and .AERO. Do they have a case?

See more ...


  posted at: 23:24 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/manwinsuit.html

19 Nov 2011

J D Falk Email

J D Falk, one of the best known people in the e-mail industry, died this week from cancer. Despite his youth (20 years younger than me) he had worked for nearly every important e-mail company, and accomplished as much as anyone.

I couldn't possibly write as fine a remembrance as the one that Neil Schwartzman did, so please read it here.


  posted at: 14:42 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/jdfalk.html

15 Nov 2011

Heavy hitters come out against new GTLDs ICANN

In a press release earlier this week, a long list of large US businesses and trade associations announced the formation of the Coalition for Responsible Internet Domain Oversight or CRIDO.

It has long been apparent to me that ICANN stopped listening to all of the reasons that a flood of new TLDs is a bad idea, mesmerized by a combination of lobbying by parties that stand to profit from them, and the prospect of a torrent of cash for ICANN itself. It is a complete waste of time to try to use ICANN's own processes to make them stop and reconsider or even slow down a little.

Although ICANN fancies itself to be a global-scope bottom-up, multi-stakeholder, consensus-based (is that enough hyphens?) organization, in fact it is a California not-for-profit corporation subject to US law. So the key facts about CRIDO are that a) they're in the US, and b) they represent organizations with a great deal of money and a great deal to lose from new TLDs. CRIDO clearly exists to force ICANN to defend its new TLD plans in US courts, and I look forward to the discovery stage in which we will with any luck learn more about the conflicts of interest by ICANN board and staff. Will we, for example, find out whether former ICANN board chair Peter Dengate Thrush already had a job offer from domain consultants Minds+Machines when he voted to approve new TLDs? Stay tuned.


  posted at: 10:14 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/crido.html

09 Nov 2011

Greylisting still works Email

Greylisting is a hoary technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets and other poorly written spamware. When a mail server receives an attempt to deliver mail from a hitherto unseen sending host IP address, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail software does try again, at which point you note that the host knows how to retry and you don't greylist mail from that IP again. The theory is that spamware doesn't retry, so you won't get that spam. I wrote a paper on it for the 2005 CEAS conference, and concluded that conservative greylisters worked well.

We've now been using greylisting for close to a decade, and some people have argued that it's no longer useful, since the bad guys could easily fix their spamware to retry, or since bots are so cheap, they could just send everything twice. So does it still work?

See more ...


  posted at: 11:11 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/grey11.html

18 Oct 2011

The Mainsleaze Blog Email
Mainsleaze is nerdy slang for spam sent by large, well-known, otherwise reputable organizations. Although the volume of mainsleaze is dwarfed by the volume of spam for fake drugs, account phishes, and Nigerian 419 fraud, it causes work for mail managers far out of proportion to its volume.

See more ...


  posted at: 01:13 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/mainsleaze.html

10 Oct 2011

Is there a reasonable way to use credit cards online? Money

A friend whose daughter just had yet another credit card cancelled and reissued due to online fraud asked me what she did that let bad guys steal her credit card.

The answer is probably nothing. Bank security stinks, and large company security stinks more. For example, a few years ago someone stole 45 million card numbers from TJ Maxx, cards which as far as I can tell, the customers swiped at the register and never left their hands. Banks are figuring out that they need to do better, but they are ponderous, timid, and move in herds, so change comes slowly. I've seen estimates from well-informed people that crooks may have something like half of all credit card numbers issued in the US.

See more ...


  posted at: 23:23 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/cards.html

22 Sep 2011

Symantec, Responsys, and spam: perfect partners? Email
I was most displeased to find the message below in my spam folder today. It was sent by Responsys on behalf of Symantec. I know it is real because it has a valid DKIM signature from symantec-corporation.com.

See more ...


  posted at: 19:49 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/symantec.html

17 Sep 2011

The design of the Domain Name System (Part VIII) - Names Outside the DNS Internet
In
previous installments we've been looking at aspects of the design of the DNS. In today's grand finale we look at the the subtle but very knotty issue of names inside and outside the DNS.

See more ...


  posted at: 23:59 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/dnsdesign8.html

08 Sep 2011

The design of the Domain Name System (Part IV) - Global consistency Internet

In the previous installments, we've been looking at aspects of the design of the DNS.

Many databases go to great effort to present a globablly consistent view of the data they control, since the alternative is to lose credit card charges and double-book airline seats.

The DNS has never tried to to that. The data is roughly consistent, but not perfectly so.

See more ...


  posted at: 10:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/dnsdesign4.html

The design of the Domain Name System (Part III) - Name structure and delegation Internet

In the previous installments, we looked at the overall design of the DNS and the way DNS name matching works.

The DNS gains considerable administrative flexibility from its delegation structure. Each zone cut, the place in the DNS name tree where one set of DNS servers hands off to another, offers the option to delegate the administration of a part of the DNS at the delegation point. But for the delegation to work well, the delegation structure has to match the name structure.

See more ...


  posted at: 10:13 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/dnsdesign3.html

The design of the Domain Name System (Part I) Internet
Over the past 30 years the Domain Name System has become an integral part of the operation of the Internet. Due to its ubiquity and good performance, many new applications over the years have used the DNS to publish information. But as the DNS and its applications have grown farther from its original use in publishing information about Internet hosts, questions have arisen about what applications are appropriate for publication in the DNS, and how one should design an application to work well with the DNS.

See more ...


  posted at: 10:08 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/dnsdesign1.html

07 Sep 2011

The design of the Domain Name System (Part V) - Large data Internet
In
the previous four installments, we've been looking at aspects of the design of the DNS. Today we look at the amount of data one can ask the DNS to store and to serve to clients.

See more ...


  posted at: 22:43 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/dnsdesign5.html

The design of the Domain Name System (Part VI) - Overloaded record types Internet
In
the five previous exciting installments, we've been looking at aspects of the design of the DNS. Today we look at records types, and how you can tell what a DNS record means.

See more ...


  posted at: 22:23 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/dnsdesign6.html

06 Sep 2011

The design of the Domain Name System (Part VII) - Related names are not related Internet
In
previous installments we've been looking at aspects of the design of the DNS. Today we look at the relationship of similar names in the DNS.

See more ...


  posted at: 00:44 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/dnsdesign7.html

26 Aug 2011

The design of the Domain Name System (Part II) - Exact and approximate name matching Internet
In the
previous installment, we looked at the overall design of the DNS. Today we'll look at the ways it does and does not allow clients to look up data by name.

See more ...


  posted at: 14:02 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/dnsdesign2.html

17 Aug 2011

How Not to Build a Mailing List Email

I've never claimed to be a marketing expert, but sometimes people leave me no choice.

Last week I got a note from a friend who works at a national non-profit which is an umbrella organization for many local chapters, which we'll call the ABC. (The details are disguised for reasons that will shortly be apparent.) The national organization has contact information for most of the chapter members, so they can send them the magazine. They've asked for e-mail addresses, although they haven't done much with them so far. They also run mailing lists for the chapter officers and the like.

So in last week's note, the friend said that they were thinking of starting an online newsletter, and would it be OK to send it to every address they have, or at least send an invitation to every address they have?. Of course not, that's Bad Marketer Syndrome.

See more ...


  posted at: 16:23 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/bms.html

10 Jul 2011

Email in the World's Languages (Part II) Email
In our
last installment we discussed MIME, Unicode and UTF-8, and IDNA, three things that have brought the Internet and e-mail out of the ASCII and English only era and closer to fully handling all languages. Today we'll look at the surprisingly difficult problems involved in fixing the last bit, internationalized e-mail addresses.

See more ...


  posted at: 15:40 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/i18n2.html

Email in the World's Languages (Part III) Email
In our
last installments we discussed the various ways to encode non-ASCII character sets, of which UTF-8 is the winner, and some complex approaches that tried to make UTF-8 mail backward compatible with ASCII mail. After years of experiments, the perhaps surprising consensus is that if you're going to do international mail, you just do it.

See more ...


  posted at: 15:40 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/i18n3.html

08 Jul 2011

Email in the World's Languages (Part I) Email

Back when the Internet was young and servers came with shovels (for the coal), everyone on the net spoke English, and all the e-mail was in English. To represent text in a computer, each character needs to have a numeric code. The most common code set was (and is) ASCII, which is basically the codes used by the cheap, reliable Teletype printing terminals everyone used as their computer consoles. ASCII is a seven bit character code, code values 0 through 127, and it includes upper and lower case letters and a reasonable selection of punctuation adequate for written English. It also includes some obscure characters, such as @ which was chosen for the middle of e-mail addresses in part because it was on the ASCII keyboard and otherwise not much used.

But nearly every other written language requires characters outside the ASCII set. On the modern Internet, mail users live in every country in the world and write in a vast array of languages, and e-mail has been slowly evolving to handle everyone else's language. In today's note I'll describe the changes already made to Internet mail to handle other languages, and in the next message I'll describe the work in progress to handle the last missing parts.

See more ...


  posted at: 02:36 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/i18n.html

04 Jul 2011

A politically incorrect guide to IPv6, Part II Internet

In a previous message we looked at the question of how hard it will be to get IPv4 address space once the original supply runs out. Today we'll look at the other end of the question, how much v4 address space do people really need?

The end to end principle says, more or less, that all computers on the Internet are in principle the same, any of them can be a server, any can be a client, and the Net should just be a dumb pipe between them, allowing people to invent new applications without having to get permission from, or even notify anyone in between. While this idea has great appeal, for consumers Internet connections, it's much more common to have several kinks in the pipe.

See more ...


  posted at: 15:22 :: permanent link to this entry :: 5 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/v6incor2.html

A politically incorrect guide to IPv6, Part I Internet

Every packet of data sent over the Internet is sent from one IP address to another. The IP addresses in the Internet serve somewhat the same function as phone numbers in the US phone system, fixed length numeric identifiers where the first part tells what network the address is on. Since the dawn of the Internet in the early 1980s, the IP addresses in use have been IPv4, 32 bit addresses which means there are about 4 billion of them. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've doubtless seen reports that the supply of IPv4 addresses is running out. Earlier this month IANA, the master allocation authority, handed out the last so-called /8, a large chunk of 16 million addresses, to one of the regional address registries, and sometime months or perhaps a few years after that, the registries will hand out the last pieces of their chunks. Then what?

The conventional wisdom is that everyone needs to support IPv6, a mostly compatible upgrade to IPv4 with much larger addresses, by the time the v4 space runs out. But I'm not so sure, particularly for e-mail.

See more ...


  posted at: 15:22 :: permanent link to this entry :: 7 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/v6incor.html

27 Jun 2011

The New gTLD Chess Game ICANN
On June 20th, the ICANN board voted to move ahead with the New gTLDs program, intended to add hundreds if not thousands of new names to the DNS root. Now what? Not even the most enthusiastic ICANN supporters think that any new TLDs will be added before the end of 2012, but there are other things going on that greatly complicate the outlook.

See more ...


  posted at: 14:48 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/tldchess.html

17 Jun 2011

Community Registrars Internet

In most parts of the world, people tend to use domain names in their country's top level domain. In the UK, it's whatever.co.uk, in Canada, it's whatever.ca, in Japan it's whatever.co.jp, and so forth. But in the US, most people use .COM rather than .US. Why?

Back in 1992 and 1993, the then-powers that be in the Internet (mostly Jon Postel) decided to arrange the .US domain in a tidy geographic way. As laid out in RFC 1386 and RFC 1480, all registrations had to be of the form <name>.<place>.st.us, such as IBM.ARMONK.NY.US (an example they used.) Government agencies had their own pseudo-places, e.g., WWW.STATE.NY.US. The place names were cities, towns, counties, and such, with reasonable abbreviations allowed such as NYC.NY.US.

See more ...


  posted at: 22:46 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/commreg.html

16 Jun 2011

The gTLD Boondoggle ICANN

I've been watching at the excitement build in the domain community, where a lot of people seem to believe that at next month's Singapore meeting, by golly, this time ICANN will really truly open the floodgates and start adding lots of new TLDs. I have my doubts, because there's still significant issues with the GAC and the US Government and ICANN hasn't yet grasped the fact that governments do not defer to NGOs, but let's back up a little and ask whether this is a good idea.

I see four arguments in favor of new TLDs:


  posted at: 19:19 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/boondoggle.html

03 Jun 2011

Bitcoin and tulip bulbs Money

Bitcoin, for anyone who's not up on their techno-trends, is this year's hot trendy digital payment system. Its main claim to fame is that it is peer-to-peer, not depending on a central bank to issue or validate the "coins", actually blobs of cryptographically signed bits. This makes it both fairly anonymous and hard to manipulate (at least in the ways that real money is manipulated), making it a darling of anarcho-libertarians.

A lot of people have opined on its merits, most notably this Quora message.

I took a look at the design of Bitcoin, which is credited to "Satoshi Nakamoto". Nobody seems to know who he is (or who they are), but he definitely knows his crypto. As a piece of cryptographic software design, it's quite clever. As a system you might want to use to pay for stuff, it's hopeless.

See more ...


  posted at: 10:11 :: permanent link to this entry :: 9 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bitcoin.html

01 Jun 2011

Introducing the Inbox Project Email

For many years, the Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII) has been a premier source of reference information about laws in the US and elsewhere. It's been around so long that in its early days, they wrote the first Windows web browser, Cello, so non-Unix users could get to the site.

One day last year, LII director Tom Bruce and I were talking over breakfast, and noted that there was no authoritative online source of legal information about spam and e-mail, something that the LII and CAUCE are, together, uniquely qualified to create. The Inbox Project is a new section of the LII web site, meeting that need.

See more ...


  posted at: 23:00 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/inbox.html

15 May 2011

IP addresses as money Internet
It's no secret that the supply of IPv4 addresses, on which the Internet has been based since the dawn of digital time, is rapidly running out. The official replacement is much larger IPv6 addresses, but I can report from experience that the task of switching is not trivial, and for a long time there will be a lot of the net that's only on IPv4. So once the initial supply of IPv4 addresses run out, and the only way to get some is to buy them from someone else, what will the market be like?

See more ...


  posted at: 21:27 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/ipmoney.html

28 Apr 2011

What next for Email Service Providers? Email

It's been a very bad month for ESPs, companies that handle bulk mailings for their clients. Several of them have had internal security breaches, leaking client information, client mailing lists, or both. Many have also seen clients compromised, with the compromised credentials used to send spam. The sequence of events sugests all the ESPs whose clients were compromised were themselves compromised first. (That's how the crooks knew who to attack.)

The Online Trust Alliance published some guidelines, that offer mostly good advice. So what should ESPs do now?

See more ...


  posted at: 12:41 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/espnext.html

21 Apr 2011

Insecure ESP du jour: Emailvision Email
Emailvision is a bulk mail company in the suburbs of Paris, France. They are, in my experience, almost uniquely inept. Nearly all of the mail they send to my users is clearly spam, sent to addresses on stolen, scraped, or resold lists, which is pretty impressive in France, a country where selling individuals' personal information is illegal.

See more ...


  posted at: 17:52 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/emailvis.html

19 Apr 2011

Holomaxx, yet again Email

When last we saw the Holomaxx case, in which a bulk mailer in Pennsylvania sued Microsoft and Yahoo in separate cases for not delivering their mail on the legally absurd theory that Microsoft and Yahoo are required to deliver mail from random spammers who claim to be CAN SPAM compliant, the judge threw the case out, but gave them the option to amend their complaint and try again.

They've refiled against Yahoo, with the main difference being that they added out of context quotations from a MAAWG document that doesn't say what Holomaxx wishes that it said. At this point, the main question is how much more of his time the judge will allow them to waste before he shuts them down for good.

Word to the Wise has a more detailed analysis and a link to the amended complaint.


  posted at: 21:20 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/holo4.html

Latest hacked ESP: Cheetahmail Email
This spam showed up in one of my user's mailboxes earlier today. It was sent from Cheetahmail, a large Email Service Provider, easily verified by checking the sending IP address It is not an ad for Adobe and the URL, which you should definitely not visit, is located in China, and shows a fake Adobe web page which invites you to download a fake Adobe Reader update which is in fact malware. The headers in the message suggest that someone used a Cheetamail client's credentials to log in and create and send this spam in large quantities. (My tiny network got four of them, three of them to spamtrap addresses.)

See more ...


  posted at: 10:17 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/chspam.html

07 Apr 2011

Anti-social networks Email
I've belonged to
LinkedIn for a long time, long enough to have collected over 500 connections, all to people I at least sort of know. It's sometimes useful. So why am I about ready to block all their mail as spam?

See more ...


  posted at: 23:12 :: permanent link to this entry :: 4 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/linkspam.html

03 Apr 2011

Report from the ICANN front lines in San Francisco ICANN

I didn't get to the San Francisico ICANN meeting, but my friend J.D. Falk did.

Don't miss Impenetrable Processes and Fool's Gold at ICANN, his report of what he found there.


  posted at: 16:25 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/jdsf.html

24 Mar 2011

Judge Chin shoves the Google settlement toward sanity Copyright Law
The Google book settlement has been grinding through the courts since the Authors' Guild and Association of American Publishers (AAP) sued them in a class action in 2005, and they came to a tentative settlement in 2008. Yesterday Judge Denny Chin once again rejected the proposed settlement, with a strong hint about how to fix it. Fortunately for the American public, Judge Chin is an excellent judge with a deep understanding of the issues, and his
opinion makes it clear what all the problems with the proposed settlement are.

See more ...


  posted at: 09:57 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/googrej.html

19 Mar 2011

ICANN Approves Dot XXX Again ICANN
At Friday's board meeting, ICANN once again narrowly approved the contentious .XXX domain intended for pornography. What this vote primarily shows is that ICANN's processes have been broken for a long time, and aren't getting fixed.

See more ...


  posted at: 01:40 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/xxx11.html

05 Mar 2011

How hard is it to speak anonymously on the Internet? Internet
A friend (yes, really) asks that if someone sends you an anonymous e-mail message, how anonymous is it? That depends how skilled they are.

See more ...


  posted at: 11:56 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/anony.html

02 Mar 2011

A politically incorrect guide to IPv6, Part III Internet

In two previous messages we looked at the question of how hard it will be to get IPv4 address space once the original supply runs out, and how much v4 address space people really need. Today we look at e-mail and IPv6.

Of all the applications on the net, mail is probably the one that is least affected by NAT, and will be the least affected by running out of v4 addresses. For one thing, mail doesn't need a whole lot of IP addresses. You can easily put 10,000 users behind mail servers on a single IP, and even a giant mail system is unlikely to need more than a few hundred IPs. (For example, all of Hotmail's inbound servers sit behind 24 IPs.) So even if you had to go buy addresses for your v4 mail servers, you wouldn't have to buy very many.

See more ...


  posted at: 18:45 :: permanent link to this entry :: 7 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/v6incor3.html

13 Feb 2011

Domains and the freedom to speak ICANN

For a very long time, predating the birth of ICANN, there's been a running battle about what should be required when one registers domain names. To oversimplify quite a lot, one side sees domain names as an essential component of free speech, so anyone should be able to register any domain without limit, the other notes that they're primarily used for commercial purposes and they enable quite a lot of mischief, so the more control, the better. This has led to endless skirmishes about the WHOIS service, one side wanting to abolish it or make it as hard as possible to get info about registrants, the other wanting ICANN to enforce the widely ignored rules that every domain is supposed to have accurate contact info.

Back in 1995, before the current shape of the net was clear, the domains as speech argument sort of made sense. It wasn't clear how dominant the web would be, and search engines weren't widely available, so many people still thought that the DNS would be used as the Internet's directory, an approach that top-level domains like .MUSEUM and .TRAVEL tried with a total lack of success. But it's not 1995 any more.

See more ...


  posted at: 00:47 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/not95.html

12 Jan 2011

Wow, Sanford Wallace Owes a Lot of Money Email
Last September
MySpace sued ur-spammers Sanford "Spamford" Wallace and Walt "Pickle Jar" Rines for egregious violations of CAN SPAM. After some early skirmishes involving an expert for Wallace so unqualified that the judge threw out his testimony, Wallace and Rines stopped responding, so as was widely reported, earlier this week the court granted a default judgement. Since they sent a lot of spam, the statutory damages came to an enormous $235 million. Even for Spamford, that's a lot of money.

See more ...


  posted at: 21:56 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/spamford2.html

09 Jan 2011

This Blog Post Is Confidential Internet

Every day we get mail with text like this at the bottom:

This E-mail and any of its attachments may contain [big company] proprietary information, which is privileged, confidential, or subject to copyright belonging to [big company]. This E-mail is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient of this E-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying, or action taken in relation to the contents of and attachments to this E-mail is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this E-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and permanently delete the original and any copy of this E-mail and any printout.
Why do people put those tags on their mail? And do they mean anything? I can't answer the first question, but the answer to the second is definitely No.

See more ...


  posted at: 11:00 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/confid.html

08 Jan 2011

Yahoo also reponds to Holomaxx Email

On Dec 23, Yahoo responded to the silly Holomaxx lawsuit. Their analysis agrees with mine: every claim is wrong, and the suit has no merit at all. This doesn't mean that I'm a brilliant legal analyst. It just means that the issues are obvious.

Laura at Word to the Wise goes through the response and we all agree, they have no case.


  posted at: 19:38 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/holohoo.html

03 Jan 2011

Should it be a crime to read your spouse's e-mail? Email
Leon and Clara Walker live near Detroit, divorced on Dec 14, and clearly should never have gotten married in the first place. The case is a messy one with multiple ex-husbands and child custody battles, but its basic facts seem not to be in dispute.

See more ...


  posted at: 21:19 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/divorcemail.html

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