Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home 18 Feb 2012 How spamtraps work, maybe Email This, uh, fell off a truck. I cannot vouch for its authenticity. > Who wants to answer this one? Oh, what the heck, tell him about it. ::---- snip ---- See more ... posted at: 15:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Email/traps.trackback 07 Feb 2012 Phish or Fair? Internet It shouldn't be a big surprise to hear that phishing is a big problem for banks. Criminals send email pretending to be a bank, and set up web sites that look a lot like a bank. One reason that phishing is possible is that e-mail has no built in security, so that if a mail message comes in purporting to be from, say, accounts@bankofamerica.com, there's no easy way to tell whether the message is really from bankofamerica.com, or from a crook. Mail authentication schemes like DKIM and the new dmarc.org group use cryptographic signatures to help authenticate mail and prove that it really is from who it purports to be from. So, if the mail can authenticate the sender, the phishing problem goes away, right? See more ... posted at: 02:36 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Internet/porf.trackback 02 Feb 2012 World notices that Verisign said three months ago that they had a security breach two years ago Internet The trade press is abuzz today with reports about a security breach at Verisign. While a security breach at the company that runs .COM, .NET, and does the mechanical parts of managing the DNS root is interesting, this shouldn't be news, at least, not now. Since Verisign is a public company, they file a financial report called a 10-Q with the SEC every quarter. According to the SEC's web site, Verisign filed their 10-Q for June through September 2011 on October 28th. where it's been available to the public ever since. See more ... posted at: 20:45 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Internet/vrsnbreach.trackback 28 Jan 2012 The state of mail database marketing Email My mail server has a lot of spamtraps. They come from various sources, but one of the most prolific is bad addresses in personal domains. Several of my users have their own domains, such as my own johnlevine.com, in which they use a handful of addresses. Those addresses tend either to be people's first names, for individual mailboxes, or else the names of companies. If I did business with Verizon (which I do not) I might give them an address like verizon@johnlevine.com. All those domains get mail to lots of other addresses, which is 100% spam. The made up addresses are largely dictionary attacks, which is obvious when I see sequential spam to barry@, betsy@, and bruno@. Some of them are company addresses that leaked to spammers before the companies went out of business years ago. And some are just mysteries. See more ... posted at: 15:44 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Email/stale.trackback 22 Jan 2012 No, I'm not offering to tune your spam filters for free Email Fortinet is a security appliance company in California. One of the services they offer to their thousands of customers is spam filtering, nothing odd about that. But I was rather startled to see this block at the top of an otherwise ordinary Russian language spam that arrived here from a poorly secured mail server in Malaysia See more ... posted at: 20:28 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Email/fortigard.trackback 08 Jan 2012 Reset, Refresh, Reinfect? Internet The upcoming Windows 8 will include new features to Reset or Refresh your computer. Reset wipes out your entire disk and restores it to they way it was when the computer was new, Refresh keeps some files and settings, but wipes and restores everything else. Given the propensity of Windows machines to become overrun with malware, rogue toolbars, cramware, and other unwanted annoyances, a way to get rid of it all quickly seems like a great idea. But ... See more ... posted at: 00:47 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Internet/ms8.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 15 Email - 180 ICANN - 81 Internet - 22 Money - 11 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs CAUCE The AARP Are Spamming Again 42 days ago Box of Meat RIP JD Falk 97 days ago A keen grasp of the obvious Tourtière around the world 48 days ago Related sites Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail IRTF Anti-Spam Research Group Network Abuse Clearinghouse

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CAN SPAM address harvesting notice: the operator of this website will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by this website to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.