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

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Home :: Email 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 26 Dec 2011 Filtering spam at the transport level Email An interesting new paper from the Naval Postgraduate School (paper here, conference slides here) describes what appears to be an interesting new twist on spam filtering, looking at the characteristics of the TCP session through which the mail is delivered. See more ... posted at: 23:40 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Email/tcpfilter.trackback 07 Dec 2011 More on Greylisting still works Email Last month I blogged about greylisting, a well-known anti-spam technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets. When a mail server receives a an attempt to deliver mail from an IP address that's never sent mail before, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail senders always retry, badly written spamware often doesn't. I found that even though everyone knows about greylisting, about 2/3 of IPs don't successfully retry. See more ... posted at: 23:11 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Email/grey11a.trackback 19 Nov 2011 J D Falk Email J D Falk, one of the best known people in the e-mail industry, died this week from cancer. Despite his youth (20 years younger than me) he had worked for nearly every important e-mail company, and accomplished as much as anyone. I couldn't possibly write as fine a remembrance as the one that Neil Schwartzman did, so please read it here. posted at: 14:37 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Email/jdfalk.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 15 Email - 179 ICANN - 81 Internet - 21 Money - 11 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs CAUCE The AARP Are Spamming Again 24 days ago Box of Meat RIP JD Falk 79 days ago A keen grasp of the obvious Tourtière around the world 30 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.