Email

Clouded by a Convenient Illusion

In a relatively short time, the phrase "in the cloud" has become a term of art when talking about the internet. A quick Google search shows nearly a million uses of the phrase in the past month, a 3x increase from the same period in 2009. But, what does it actually mean to have your web site, your software, your data, or anything else "in the cloud?" "In the cloud" is derived from "cloud computing," which in turn is just a new term for distributed computing, where data-crunching tasks are spread across a variety of different physical processing units. This was common in mainframes in the 1960s, and later the idea of distributing processing across cheap PCs running Linux became popular in the 1990s.

Does the First Amendment Forbid Spam Filtering?

A friend of mine wrote to ask: "The Supreme Court overturned the Jaynes conviction on First Amendment grounds, yes? I'm wondering what that could mean from the spam filtering perspective." Spam filters, and in particular DNS blacklists are intended to prevent e-mail from being delivered. Doesn't the First Amendment make it illegal to block speech? The short answer is no, but of course it's slightly more complicated than that in practice.

Reputation and “The Cloud”

As Reddit recently learned it's not a great idea to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host mailservers. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the reputation of mail coming from EC2 servers. When you're using machines in the cloud, changing IP addresses is as simple as initializing a new server. Spammers discovered this almost as soon as the EC2 cloud became public.

When Registrars Look the Other Way, Drug-Dealers Get Paid

Since November of last year we have been discussing the problem of illicit and illegal online pharmacy support by ICANN-accredited Registrars. In several articles and direct contact with the Registrars we have tirelessly tried to convey the seriousness of this problem, many listened, some did not... With the background information already known, the case presented here is much more specific and concerns EvaPharmacy, which was until recently, the world's largest online criminal pharmacy network.

More on Portable Email Addresses

Last month a bill in the Israeli Knesset would have required ISPs to provide portable e-mail addresses, analogous to portable phone numbers that one can take from one phone company to the other. As I noted at the time, e-mail works differently from telephone calls, and portability would be difficult, expensive, and unreliable. So I was wondering, idly, if we really wanted to provide portable e-mail addresses, how hard would it be?

ClamAV and the Case of the Missing Mail

Some email discussion lists were all atwitter yesterday, as Sourcefire's open-source anti-virus engine ClamAV version 0.94.x reached its end-of-life. Rather than simply phase this geriatric version out the development team put to halt instances of V0.94 in production yesterday, April 15, 2010. In other words, the ClamAV developers caused version .94 to stop working entirely, and, depending upon the implementation, that meant email to systems using ClamAV also stopped flowing.

Email User Safety At Risk - MAAWG Consumer Survey 2010

The 2010 version of the now-annual Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group (MAAWG) 'Email Security Awareness and Usage Report' was released yesterday. While un-belied by the title, the vernacular name might get a bit more attention: "The MAAWG Consumer Email Survey". ... Consumers were surveyed in North America and across Europe with variety of questions from computer expertise and savvy, to their preferences of email.

MIT 2010 Spam Conference Starts Tomorrow…

In January we presented the glorious history of the MIT spam conference, today we present the schedule for the first day. Opening session will be from this author, Garth Buren with a topic entitled The Internet Doomsday Book, with details be released the same day as the presentation. Followed by Dr. Robert Bruen with a review of activities since the last MIT spam conference...

Are Portable Email Addresses Possible?

News reports say that the Israeli government is close to passing a law that requires portable e-mail addresses, similar to portable phone numbers. Number portability has been a success, making it much easier to switch from one provider to another, and address portability might ease switching among ISPs. But e-mail is not phone calls. Is it even possible?

Email Portability Approved by Knesset Committee

The email portability bill has just been approved by the Knesset's committee for legislation, sending it on its way for the full legislation process of the Israeli parliament. While many users own a free email account, many in Israel still make use of their ISP's email service. According to this proposed bill, when a client transfers to a different ISP the email address will optionally be his to take along, "just like" mobile providers do today with phone numbers.