Email

IPv6 Will Change the Face of Email Filtering, Says Report

Data solutions provider Return Path has released a new report highlighting 20 visionary ideas for brands to "futureproof" their email program. Among various insights, the report warns brands that adoption of IPv6 will result in rising dependency on domain-based reputation. more

Digging Through the Problem of IPv6 and Email - Part 3

One idea to make the problem of mail more manageable is to restrict the address space that is allowed to send mail. In an ideal world, we'd restrict where mail mail servers could send mail from. So, if we say that the number of individual mail servers in the world will probably never exceed 32 million (not unreasonable), or 2^25, then what if the 25 least significant bits were reserved for mail servers? more

Email Recommendation Engine for ESPs – Text Length Optimization (Part II)

Popular email editors today have no way to optimize for text length. An email marketer may attempt to build her content but has no idea whether that content is optimized related to word count for a specific industry/client. As it relates only to text length, does the email have too many or too few words. Currently, there is no built-in predictive model to inform her. Well, until now. Last month we described an evolutionary real-time data-driven process for email campaign builders to have at their disposal. more

Massive Cyberattack Aimed at Flooding .Gov Email Inboxes With Subscription Requests

"Massive Email Bombs Target .Gov Addresses," Brian Krebs writes in Krebs on Security: "Over the weekend, unknown assailants launched a massive cyber attack aimed at flooding targeted dot-gov (.gov) email inboxes with subscription requests to thousands of email lists." more

Commentary on the FTC Spam Summit

The following speech was prepared with the intention of using portions of it during the FTC Spam Summit, but CAUCE was not given the opportunity to participate due to time constraints... "I am here today to question. Yesterday we heard how the tenor of the discussion about spam became more mature. How, in the period of time that has elapsed since the last summit, things have developed as an industry. That may be true, but I question if the discussion at hand here this week is truly a big tent effort. I see few anti-spammers here..." more

How the Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) Makes the Mailbox Safer

Nowadays, with increasing digitalization and internet usage, email is a central communication tool. This holds true even despite the high popularity of instant messaging apps and social media. Email remains the favorite means of business communication worldwide, both in B2B and B2C. In 2019, 293.6 billion emails were sent and received. By 2025, this number will grow even more. It is predicted that we will send and receive 376.4 billion emails per day. In this scenario, implementing security features for email communications has become absolutely essential. more

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. more

NIST Publishes Guide for DNS-Based Email Security, Draft Open for Public Comments

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has invited comments on a draft practice guide to help organizations improve email security and defend against phishing, man-in-the-middle, and other types of email-based attacks. more

Phishing: An Interesting Twist on a Common Scam

After Two Security Assessments I Must Be Secure, Right? Imagine you are the CIO of a national financial institution and you've recently deployed a state of the art online transaction service for your customers. To make sure your company's network perimeter is secure, you executed two external security assessments and penetration tests. When the final report came in, your company was given a clean bill of health. At first, you felt relieved, and confident in your security measures. Shortly thereafter, your relief turned to concern. ...Given you're skepticism, you decide to get one more opinion. ...And the results were less than pleasing. more

Study Finds $9.8B Opportunity In Universal Acceptance of All New Generic and Internationalized TLDs

Report from a new study by Analysys Mason, commissioned by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), says there is a potential USD $9.8 billion growth opportunity in online revenue through a routine update to Internet systems, including those for speakers of languages that do not use the English script. more

Political Email Placement or, You’re Not Special

A recent piece in The Markup called Swinging the Vote? attempts to figure out how Google decides where to deliver political e-mail. They were startled to discover that only a small fraction of it was delivered into the main inbox, and a fair amount was classed as spam. They shouldn't have been. This is an example of the fallacy We're so nice that the rules don't apply to us, which is far too common among non-profit and political mailers. more

Email Recommendation System-Abstract: Deployment Considerations (Part III)

Perhaps, one of the most thrilling moments of any machine learning project for a data science team is learning that they get to deploy the model in a production environment. However, this can be a daunting task or a simplified one, if all the tools are readily available. Machine-learning (ML) models "require" deployment to a production environment to deliver optimal business value, and the reality is that most models never make it to production. more

Phishing Attacks Targeting Executives Now Top Cybersecurity Insurance Claims, Says AIG

A new report published by the insurance giant, AIG, claims phishing attacks via email, often targeted at senior executives, has overtaken ransomware. more

Searching for Truth in DKIM: Part 3 of 5

Last year, MAAWG published a white paper titled Trust in Email Begins with Authentication [PDF], which explains that authentication (DKIM) is “[a] safe means of identifying a participant-such as an author or an operator of an email service” while reputation is a “means of assessing their trustworthiness.”

IPv6 DNS Blacklists Reconsidered

I opined about a year ago that DNS blacklists wouldn't work for mail that runs over IPv6 rather than IPv4. The reason is that IPv6 has such a huge range of addresses that spammers can easily send every message from a unique IP address, which means that recipient systems will fire off a unique set of DNSBL queries for every message... Now I'm much less sure this will be a problem... more