It was revealed yesterday that Yahoo has been scanning people's email for the federal government. This activity was, apparently, authorized by Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer but not the former CSO Alex Stamos. Mr. Stamos left Yahoo in June 2015. He also publicly disagreed with the director of the NSA back in February 2015 about the NSA having access to encrypted data. more
DMARC is an anti-phishing scheme that was repurposed in April to try to deal with the fallout from security breaches at AOL and Yahoo. A side effect of AOL and Yahoo's actions is that a variety of bad things happen to mail that has 'From:' addresses at aol.com or yahoo.com, but wasn't sent from AOL or Yahoo's own mail systems. If the mail is phish or spam, that's good, but when it's mailing lists or a newspaper's mail-an-article, it's no so good. more
Spam levels have increased by 5.1% since last month, reaching heights of 90.4%, according to latest report from Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence... The majority of this increase in spam in May was comprised of messages with very little content other than a subject line and valid hyperlink, says the report. "Each hyperlink pointed to a different active profile on one of a number of major social networking environments. The profiles were likely created using random names and automated CAPTCHA-breaking tools. Moreover, the emails were sent from valid webmail hosting providers, which means they were not spoofed, as has been the case in the past for these types of domains." more
Do Out of Office alerts these days serve a purpose anymore? They seem to work well a decade ago when you were really out of the office and your computer sat under your desk and you couldn't check email till you got to it. Today, we as an industry and as individuals now have laptops, iPads, Smartphones, Wifi, WiMAX, etc. keeping us 100% of the time on the Internet at one time or another. And you know we all at one point throughout our days whether or not on vacation or after 5 PM check email as part of our everyday lives. more
CDA Section 230 has been called "The 26 Words that Created the Internet". While it is obvious how Sec 230 protects the World Wide Web, it is equally important for e-mail. A recent Pennsylvania court case emphasizes this point. Dr. Thomas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, forwarded an article about another professor Dr. Monge to an online e-mail discussion list. Dr. Monge claimed the article was defamatory and sued Dr. Thomas, the university, and many others. more
I am excited to announce the recent release of the industry first Best Common Practices document for Cloud and Hosting providers for addressing abuse issues that was created by M3AAWG and the i2Coalition. M3AAWG has been collaborating with the Best Practices Working Group of the i2Coalition over the past 2 years to discuss ways to solve malicious activity within hosting and cloud ecosystems. more
While the news will not be terribly surprising to CircleID readers, Google's latest report on the status of spam and 2009 predictions posted today, might be of particular interest due to the company's shear email processing volume at 2 billion enterprise email connections per day (drawn from company owned Postini Message Security network)... more
A couple things related to the intersection of email and law happened recently. The 6th circuit court ruled that the government must have a search warrant before accessing email. The published opinion is interesting reading, not just because of the courts ruling on the law but also because of the defendant. more
Josh Baer, former VP of Datran Media and current CEO of OtherInBox has been floating an idea at the DMA's Email Experience Council and a few other places, and recently got some traction in Ken Magill's Magill Report. What Josh is proposing is to create the technical means by which a Sender can decide when email 'expires' and is automatically removed from a recipient's inbox, either by deletion, or perhaps archiving (in the case of Gmail). This would supposedly help the end-user, by removing marketing offers that are no longer available. Why this idea shouldn't happen... more
Between September of 2015 and May 2016, (last 8 months) Port25 saw almost a 30 percent jump in new cloud-based email infrastructure interest outside the United States... While most of the influential senders are not abandoning on-premises mail transfer agent (MTA) solutions, many are looking to cloud infrastructure for managing higher-volumes by bifurcating individual email streams to the cloud. more
Coen Dijkgraaf writes: "Project Honey Pot is a community of tens of thousands of web and email administrators from more than 170 countries around the world who are working together to track online fraud and abuse. The Project has been online since 2004 and each day receives millions of email and comment spam messages which are catalogued and shared with law enforcement and security partners. On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message. For the full article and some intersting statistics about spamming, see 1 Billion Spammers Served." more
Every year M3AAWG gives an award for lifetime work in fighting abuse and making the Internet a better place. Yesterday at its Dublin meeting they awarded it to Rodney Joffe, who has been quietly working for over 20 years. I can't imagine anyone who deserves it more. more
It is inconceivable that anyone within viewing distance of a television or computer screen this week doesn't know about the disaster in Haiti. As of this writing, 50,000 bodies have been collected from the streets of Port-au-Prince. Millions of people, a number our brains simply aren't equipped to deal with, are now homeless. Help is needed now, and will be, for a very long time. more
ICANN introduced a requirement for domain name registrars to send out annual notices to all their customers (registrants) to check the Whois on their domain names to ensure the information is correct. While this seemed fairly reasonable (if cumbersome), the fact is it confuses the heck out of people -- and creates a whole lot of confusion for registrants. But that was a problem we could deal with. Fast-forward to October, 2008... more
It is surprisingly difficult to get accurate figures for the amount of spam that is sent globally, yet everyone agrees that the global volume of spam has come down a lot since its peak in late 2008. At the same time, despite some recent small decreases, the catch rates of spam filters remain generally high... A world in which email can be used without spam filters is a distant utopia. Yet, the decline of spam volumes and the continuing success (recent glitches aside) of filters have two important consequences. more
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