Email

An End to Spam Litigation Factories? (Gordon v. Virtumundo)

When CAN-SPAM was passed in 2003, it was fairly clear that Congress wasn't trying to enable broad private enforcement. Everyone knew that rabid anti-spammers would seize any new statutory right for a litigation frenzy... Although I personally think Congress would better served all of us by omitting all private enforcement rights in CAN-SPAM, unquestionably the private rights in CAN-SPAM are drafted narrowly to prevent their abuses. That hasn't stopped some zealous anti-spammers from testing the limits of CAN-SPAM's private enforcement remedies anyway. more

Digging Through the Problem of IPv6 and Email - Part 1

Recently, a couple of anti-spam (or at least email security related) bloggers have written some articles about IPv6 and the challenges that the email industry faces regarding it. John Levine, who has written numerous RFCs and a couple of books about spam fighting, writes the following in his article "A Politically Incorrect Guide to IPv6, part III". more

Microsoft, Federal Agencies Take Down Rustock Botnet

Neil Schwartzman writes: "There is a lot of press on the profound effect the take-down of the Rustock botnet, affected by Microsoft, some U.S. federal agencies, and countless others working in the background to assist in the effort. CAUCE has aggregated a few of the best stories and data-points. A community congratulations, and thank-you to all those involved!" more

An Unwelcome Afterlife for a Long-Dead Blacklist

There's still a few weeks before Halloween, but have we ever got a scary story for you -- and every word of it is true. (Imagine we're sitting around a campfire, chowing down on s'mores, flashlights under our faces.) Seven years ago, on this very internet, there was a man named Matthew who was angry about spam. Now sure, there are lots of people angry about spam, and some of them are named Matthew, but this particular Matthew decided that he was going to do something about it... more

Nearly 1 Million IP Addresses Used by Attackers on a Single Target

According to a recent report by Akamai, an analysis of massive Account Takeover (ATO) attack campaigns, targeting two of its customers, revealed 1,127,818 different IPs were involved in the attacks. more

What’s ARC?

DMARC is an anti-phishing technique that AOL and Yahoo repurposed last year to help them deal with the consequences of spam to (and apparently from) addresses in stolen address books. Since DMARC cannot tell mail sent through complex paths like mailing lists from phishes, this had the unfortunate side effect of screwing up nearly every discussion list on the planet. Last week the DMARC group published a proposal called ARC, for Authenticated Received Chain, that is intended to mitigate the damage. What is it, and how likely is it to work? more

DMA Requires Email Authentication, Do We Care?

Last week the DMA announced with considerable fanfare that their members should all use e-mail authentication. DMA members send a lot of bulk e-mail, but not much that would be considered spam by any normal metric. (Altria's Gevalia Kaffee is one of the few exceptions.) Their main problem is their legitimate bulk mail, sent in large quantities from fixed sources, getting caught by ISPs spam filters. That happens to be one problem for which path authentication schemes like SPF and Sender ID are useful, since they make it easier to add known fixed source mailers to a recipient ISP's whitelist, and that's just what AOL and probably other big ISPs use it for. While the DMA may be implying that this is a virtuous move, in reality it's something that their members are doing anyway for straightforward business purposes. more

Spamford Wallace Gets Sued Yet Again

If there were a lifetime achievement award for losing lawsuits for being annoying, Sanford Wallace would be a shoo-in. Fifteen years ago, his junk faxing was a major impetus for the TCPA, the law outlawing junk faxes. Later in the 1990s, his Cyber Promotions set important legal precedents about spam in cases where he lost to Compuserve and AOL. Two years ago, he lost a suit to FTC who sued his Smartbot.net for stuffing spyware onto people's computers. And now, lest anyone think that he's run out of bad ideas, he's back, on the receiving end of a lawsuit from MySpace... more

Email Snooping Can Be Intrusion Upon Seclusion

Analysis could also affect liability of enterprises using cloud computing technologies... Local elected official Steinbach had an email account that was issued by the municipality. Third party Hostway provided the technology for the account. Steinbach logged in to her Hostway webmail account and noticed eleven messages from constituents had been forwarded by someone else to her political rival. more

2014 M3AAWG Mary Litynski Award Nominations Now Being Accepted

In 2010 the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M³AAWG) and the Internet industry as a whole lost a great friend and supporter, Mary Litynski. Her dedication, excellence, perseverance and tireless work behind the scenes of M³AAWG helped make the organization the success that it is today. Through this award, M³AAWG seeks to bring attention to the remarkable work that is done far from the public eye over a significant period of time... more

Normalize inflated iOS 15 Email Open Rates with Unsupervised ML

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

Virginia Court Throws Out Spam Law; One Spammer Gets Away With It

The 2004 criminal spam case against large-scale spammer Jeremy Jaynes, which I've covered in several previous blog entries, appears to have come to an ignominious end with the state supreme court throwing out the law under which he was convicted. The Virginia anti-spam law was one of the first in the country with criminal provisions, but it failed due to the way that First Amendment cases are treated differently from all other cases. more

Spam Fighters: Revenge is a Dish Best Left in the Freezer and Forgotten

There's no denying that the fight against spam attracts a lot of crazies, both pro- and anti-spam. One of the common attributes of the anti-spam kooks is that they often think in terms of somehow taking revenge against the spammers -- regardless of who else gets hurt along the way. In 2005, that revenge came in the form of BlueFrog, a service which purported to launch what can only be called denial of service attacks against spammers' web sites... This week, a company called SpamZa was hurriedly making a similar mistake... more

When DNSBLs Go Bad

I have often remarked that any fool can run a DNS-Based Blacklist (DNSBL) and many fools do so. Since approximately nobody uses the incompetently run black lists, they don't matter. Unfortunately, using a DNSBL requires equally little expertise, which becomes a problem when an operator wants to shut down a list. When someone sets up a mail server (which we'll call an MTA for Mail Transfer Agent), one of the tasks is to configure the anti-spam features, which invariably involves using DNSBLs. more

Encrypted Email Sign Ups Have Doubled Since Trump Victory, Says PortonMail

Since Trump’s victory, the number of new users signing up for the Switzerland-based encrypted email service provider, ProtonMail, has doubled compared to the previous week, the company reported. more