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21 Apr 2017
Classified ad site craigslist is famously protective of its contents. While they are happy for search engines like Google to index the listings, they really, really do not like third parties to scrape and republish their content in other forms. In 2013 craigslist sued a company called 3taps which had created an API for craigslist data. They also sued real estate site Padmapper, which showed craigslist and other apartment listings on a map, something craigslist didn't do at the time. After extensive legal wrangling, 3taps eventually gave up and in 2015 paid craigslist $1 million and shut down. Craigslist donated the money to the EFF which was a little odd since the EFF had generally supported 3taps. One of 3taps' other customers was another real estate site Radpad, which kept showing craigslist listings after 3taps shut down.
26 Jan 2017
In September I wrote about a proposal to allow one-click unsubscriptions from mailing lists without user interaction. After taking a rather tortuous path through the IETF, it's now been issued as RFC 8058. The changes since September are quite minor, mostly tightening up some details to prevent various attacks from fake unsub requests. Now that it's official, I expect email service providers will start implementing it, and we'll have an arguably better alternative to mail feedback loops to tell mailers when their mail is unwanted.
20 Dec 2016
I have groused at length about the damage that anti-phishing technique DMARC does to e-mail discussion lists. For at least two years list managers and list software developers have been trying to figure out what to do about it. The group that brought us DMARC is working on an un-DMARC-ing scheme called ARC, which will likely help somewhat, but ARC isn't ready yet, and due to ARC's complexity it's likely that there will be many medium or small mail systems that enforce DMARC and can't or won't use ARC. The Internet Engineering Task Force, which writes technical standards for the Internet, works primarily through discussion lists, and the pain from DMARC has gotten to the point where we may do something about it. So we've been doing some experiments.
30 Sep 2016
Unsubscribing from mailing lists is hard. How many times have you seen a message "please remove me from this list," followed by two or three more pointing out that the instructions are in the footer of every message, followed by three or four more asking people to not send their replies to the whole list (all sent to the whole list, of course,) perhaps with a final message by the list manager saying she's dealt with it? For marketing broadcast lists, it's even worse because there's no list to write to. Messages are supposed to have an unsubscribe link (required by law in most places) which usually works except when it doesn't, or it leads to a web page making incomprehensible demands ("click here unless you want not to be removed only from this sender's mail") so for a lot of users it's easier just to click the junk button until the messages go away.
20 Sep 2016
The plan of challenges seems simple enough; they demand that the sender does something to prove he's human that a spammer is unlikely to do. The simplest ones just ask you to respond to the challenge, the worse ones like this one have a variety of complicated hoops they expect you to jump through. What this does, of course, is to outsource the management of your mailbox to people who probably do not share your interests.
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© 2005-2015 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.
A few days ago I was startled to get an anti-spam challenge from an
Earthlink user, to whom I had not written.
Challenges are a WKBA (well known bad idea) which I thought had been
stamped out, but apparently not.