Linklog Current StatusI overheard someone bitching about SPEWS blocking Telewest the other day, about how SPEWS had gone too far (seriously, are people really using SPEWS?) treating innocent users as spammers blah blah blah. The BBC story has quote from the ISP, Telewest, about why they’ve apparently been so slack about stemming the tide of spam coming [...]
Checking the spam bin today, I came across an interesting, and new to me development in the Nigerian scam (in which “cleared” checks later bounce). I’ve seen the Dutch lottery wins and those goofy widow-of-deposed-general emails for a while now. But the emails from Vincent Gravens are the next step in the scam’s evolution. The email you receive [...]
About a year ago I got excited by the prospects of the SPF anti-spam scheme. Of course this is before Microsoft negotiated to merge SPF with their own “Caller-ID” scheme and the dark cloud of IP licensing poisoned my support. Anyway, to repeat the main problem with SPF: SPF validated using envelope sender addresses. This was good because it meant that [...]
Bouquets to Hotmail for adopting the Bonded Sender whitelist that I mentioned back in 2002. Brickbats to the Slashdot monkeyboys who can somehow spin a positive antispam development into a Microsoft-is-evil story. Sigh.
There’s a good chance NTK now got nuked by a few SpamAssassin installations this week. NTK usually skirts close to the thresholds many filter systems – its invitation to unsubscribe, WHOLE LINE OF YELLING, the occasional IP addresses in a URL. Every week we get a handful of automatic mails from corporate email systems either accusing it of being [...]
Since it was linked from last week’s NTK people other than Googlebot have read a post I made in May about tightening SMTP standards and I’ve begun to get some feedback. One correspondent questioned the validity of using SMS-spam as some indication that micropayment systems wouldn’t necessarily deter spam. It’s a fair point, I suppose. Message charges are set (and collected) by [...]
Is the DMA about to start endorsing a DNSDB approach to filtering email? From a recent NMA article: Head of the Direct Marketing Association’s interactive media division, Robert Dirskovski, said its Email Marketing Council had been discussing the possibility of introducing a white list solution. This would list those who are entitled to send email, and would be regulated by ISPs and/or a government agency. [...]
The reactions to the DTI’s anti-spam regulations have been somewhat less than positive. For a start, they don’t prohibit mail going to addresses used for business (other than opt-out-per-campaign, which will have little effect). One of the practical objections to this being: how can a spammer differentiate between a business and personal address? You can’t usually tell just by looking at an [...]
There looks to be a rise in UK spam advertising “prank lines”. If you’re going to complain, then as well as the usual abuse desks, you might want to send a copy to ICSTIS who have an online complaint form. The company that was spamming a “secret admirer” phone line promo last year (Flirt Love-Box) was fined and banned for [...]
Spotted an emerging bit of jargon today: snowshow spamming A spamming technique where mail is sent from a wide area of IP addresses (such as a /24) in order to avoid tripping any threshhold that would cause a single IP address to be blocked (for example: the metrics used by spamcop).
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