Links for 9/2/09

People are still talking about the White House spamming. At Al Iverson’s Spam Resource there are two posts, one from Jaren Angerbauer titled Guest Post: Email and the White House and another from Al himself titled White House Spam, Signup Forgery, and GovDelivery. Both are insightful discussions of the spam that the White House has been sending. Over at ReturnPath, Stephanie Miller talks about how the publicity surrounding the spam is great PR for permission.
Stefan Pollard has an article at ClickZ looking at how an apology email in response to a recipient visible email mistake can actually make the fallout worse.
Web Ink Now documents one recipient’s experience with a bad, but all too common, subscription practice.
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Blocked for phishing

A couple clients recently have had bounces from different places indicating that their mails were caught by the recipients’ anti-virus filter. These are some of my better clients sending out daily newsletters. They’ve been mailing for years and I know that they are not phishing. They asked me to investigate the bounce messages.
The information I had to work with was minimal. One bounce said:

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Spam judgment not covered by insurance

Earlier this month a judge ruled that two insurance policies held by Scott Richter’s Media Breakaway were not liable to pay $6M in damages awarded in a previous case.
Myspace initially sued Media Breakaway in 2007 for allegedly using phished Myspace accounts to send emails advertising Media Breakaway websites. In summer 2008 and arbiter ruled in favor of Myspace and against Media Breakaway. After the ruling, Media Breakaway attempted to have insurance cover the fine. The insurance company denied the claims so Media Breakaway took them to court. Media Breakaway lost.
Scott has been around in the email marketing arena for a very long time. He’s had multiple run ins with the law, including a 2003 felony theft charge for stealing a number of things, including a Bobcat loader and a 2004 suit brought against him by the NY Attorney General’s office and Microsoft for spamming and deceptive advertising. That court case bankrupted his previous company, OptInRealBig. Scott has also appeared on the Daily Show, in a side-splittingly funny story about spam and email marketing…. er… high volume email deploying.

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Beware: Phishing and Spam in Social Networks

Trend Micro warns us today about how spam and phishing can hit you even in the closed ecosystem of a social networking system such as Facebook. Malware abounds. And in the social network arena, just like anywhere else, “using your account to send spam” is a common thing for the bad guys to want to do.
In Rik Ferguson’s investigation (which I read about on CNet News), he came across a link to a URL that asked for his Facebook credentials, supposedly necessary to allow installation of a specific Facebook application. Once the credentials were handed over, the app immediately spammed all of his Facebook friends, sending them a bogus notification, attempting to draw them into visiting the phishing/malware URL, with (one assumes) the hope of spreading the infection even wider.
He’s a researcher for Trend Micro, so he knows what he’s doing. But for the rest of us, this highlights how necessary it is to be careful with who you give your usernames and passwords to. In my opinion, it’s never safe to take your username and password from one site and hand it over to another site. Some social networking make the problem even worse by blurring the lines between safe and unsafe by asking for usernames and passwords to third party accounts, but you just can never know with 100% certainty which sites are legitimate and which ones aren’t.
— Al Iverson

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