As the year comes to a close, it is important to reflect on what has been one of the major actions in the anti-spam arena this year: the quest for email authentication. With email often called the "killer app" of the Internet, it is important to reflect on any major changes proposed, or implemented that can affect that basic tool that many of us have become to rely on in our daily lives. And, while many of the debates involved myriads of specialized mailing lists, standards organizations, conferences and even some government agencies, it is important for the free and open source software (FOSS) community as well as the Internet community at large, to analyze and learn lessons from the events surrounding email authentication in 2004. more
The following article is an excerpt from the recently released Internet Analysis Report 2004 - Protocols and Governance. Full details of the argument for protocol reform can be found at 'Internet Mark 2 Project' website, where a copy of the Executive Summary can be downloaded free of charge. ..."In releasing this section for comment, I would like to point out that the report's conclusions are based on a cumulative examination of various protocols and systems. We are at a point of time where other protocols and systems are equally problematic -- the report points to some significant problems with DNS structure and scalability, and also points out that, to all intents and purposes, the basic email protocol, SMTP, is broken and needs immediate replacement." more
The majority of spam -- as much as 80 per cent of all unsolicited marketing messages sent -- now emanates from residential ISP networks and home user PCs. This is due to the proliferation of spam trojans, bits of surreptitious malware code embedded in residential subscriber PCs by worms and spyware programs. Worm attacks are growing in frequency because they provide a fast means of infecting a vast number of computers with spam trojans in a very short period of time. It's no surprise that many service providers report an upsurge in spam traffic immediately following a worm attack. more
It seems to be impossible to implement a law against spam - unsolicited bulk email - without making a hash of it. At best, anti-spam laws are ineffective; at worst, they cause more problems than spam itself. Can technology fare any better? ...But despite this flurry of initiatives, we are yet to see a definitive answer to the spam problem. An Anti-Spam Technical Alliance has been formed by Microsoft, America Online, Yahoo! and EarthLink, but these companies continue to proffer competing solutions. Meanwhile, the technology being deployed in the spam wars is causing collateral damage, in the form of 'false positives' - email that is incorrectly categorised as spam, and so never reaches its intended recipient. more
Some individual appears to have hijacked more than a 1,000 home computers starting in late June or early July and has been installing a new Trojan Horse program on them. The Trojan allows this person to run a number of small websites on the hijacked home computers. These websites consists of only a few web pages and apparently produce income by directing sign-ups to for-pay porn websites through affiliate programs. Spam emails messages get visitors to come to the small websites.
To make it more difficult for these websites to be shut down, a single home computer is used for only 10 minutes to host a site. After 10 minutes, the IP address of the website is changed to a different home computer... more
The Government of India and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) organized a two-day event on Universal Acceptance Day (UAD) on the 27th and 28th of March to promote multilingual Internet and digital inclusion in India. The event highlighted the necessity of providing emails and websites in native languages to enable access to the Internet and bridge the digital divide across the nation. 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
The DNS Abuse Institute recently published our sixth monthly report for our project to measure DNS Abuse: DNSAI Compass ('Compass'). Compass is an initiative of the DNS Abuse Institute to measure the use of the DNS for phishing and malware. The intention is to establish a credible source of metrics for addressing DNS Abuse. We hope this will enable focused conversations, and identify opportunities for improvement. more
Do you know someone who deserves recognition for helping build the Internet in their region or country? Or someone who made the Internet more secure through the work they've done? Or someone who made some major technical innovation that made the Internet faster or better? more
The steepening trajectory towards event-driven and real-time API architecture is imminent. This means incorporating event-based APIs into a technology strategy and leveraging existing API legacy systems that may have incurred a fair amount of technical debt, especially for historically progressive organizations. more
Happy Holidays. In September 2021, Apple rolled out iOS 15. For high volume email senders, Apple Mail now essentially tracks every email sent as an "open." Seemingly if you are a campaign engineer, high volume sender or ESP, this change can radically affect 25% - 45% of your email subscriber base, across both B2B, B2C or D2C. Inside your email analytics platform, you should see the specific percentage of Apple Mail users in your database, thus a significant rate of change ( delta) regarding inflated "open rates." more
Look for this trio of email-related organizations MessageGears, Validity, Vidi-Emi, to become trailblazers in the RealTimeML Email landscape. This article will examine the nascent concept of utilizing RealTimeML to optimize for open rates and ultimately engagement rates by using a SendTime Email Optimization model. The model will infer RealTimeML predictions for optimal engagement rates, which provides enormous value throughout your current supply chain. Additionally, we will share ongoing time trials to serve the model efficiently. more
I can still hear it. ‘Hee hee’. That’s good. We all have unique laughs, but few are distinctive. Fewer yet belly the true nature of the human being issuing them. British insult comedian Jimmy Carr has one such laugh, a tri-tone ‘dah dah DUH,’ rising on the third expulsion. It has a bell-like quality, ringing, embodying the deft touch that Don Rickles had of insulting while loving, something Carr has mastered. It lets you know that despite him having just said something shocking and horrid, he is laughing with, never at, reassuring the target, ‘all is well.’ more
In our continuing series on RealTime machine learning recommendations for email, we will discuss the importance of Sentiment Analysis in RealTime for Email. The initial feedback we've received from the field to develop a Sentiment Analysis model has been extraordinary. We initially want to dissect why we feel this model is essential, determine the components needed to serve real-time machine learning recommendations for higher engagement rates before the campaign send, and tailoring sentiment to the types of emails companies send. more
With perhaps the most coveted valuation in the Email Industry at close to $10B, MailChimp is considered the most forward-thinking ESP on the planet boasting 12M customers, with outstanding brand recognition and an incredible leadership suite. But when it comes to installing RealTimeML, it's lollygagging mainly because it has not justified the actual value to productionalize RealTimeML across its client base. And also, because it is a challenge to execute! more
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