News and announcements: March 1, 2010

Some news stories and links today.
Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam.

The DBL is managed as a “zero false-positive” list, safe to use by production mail systems to reject emails that are flagged by it. The DBL includes URIs (domains/hostnames) which are used in spam including phishing, fraud/”419″ or domains sending or hosting malware/viruses.
[…]DBL has a monitored automated self-service removal system.

There are more changes over at AOL. Annalivia has announced she is leaving AOL.  Anna has done an immense amount of work with senders over the years and her departure is definitely going to leave a hole. Drop by her website and wish her luck.

What this means to you: escalation paths and such are still being worked out, but the India Postmaster team and I have spent a lot of time working together in the last couple months; they’ll take care of you. The AOL postmaster website and reputation tool should also be useful. I’ll provide any further information as I get it.

Via Al Iverson, there’s a new informational source at anonwhois.org. This provides a list of domains registered behind privacy protection services.
Recently at MAAWG I had the opportunity to listen to a talk by Joseph Menn author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet. He was a very engaging and entertaining speaker who really seemed to understand the interplay between organized crime and spammers.

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News and links 12/31/09

We’re iced in here in DC so I’ve been catching up with some industry news while camped in front of a heater and the TV.
Best of the ESPs by Forrester Research. Congrats to ET and Responsys for coming out on top. The results, as reported by MediaPost, match reasonably well with my overall impressions of the industry (so they must be right!)
Return Path is rolling out a new version of SenderScore. A welcome change for those of us who regularly refer to an IP’s sender score and find it doesn’t match other data.
CAUCE has done a series of posts looking back at significant events in spam over the last decade.
Al has a retrospective on various data breaches affecting email addresses over the last few years.
Happy New Year, everyone!

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News from MAAWG

During MAAWG a number of companies in the email space announce new initiatives, mergers, products and the like. This MAAWG is no different.
Spammers adjust to security trends. This is not really news, spammers have been adjusting to new security measures since folks started blocking from: addresses back in ’95 and ’96. The tactics are different and developing, but for every security hole that is blocked, spammers will search for another hole to exploit. The unfortunate truth is that end user is the weak point, and spammers and scammers are very very good at social engineering.
Spam statistics stalemate. Spam is still accounting for approximately 90% of all email traffic.
Cloudmark acquires Bizanga. I talked to some of the Cloudmark folks and they seem very excited with their acquisition of the Bizanga MTA and email technology.
Bizanga Storage announced. Bizanga Store is a scalable storage system brought to you by some of the people who were instrumental in building the Bizanga MTA acquired by Cloudmark.
ReturnPath announced partnership with RPost. Yet more ongoing changes in the certification field.

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A series of warnings

Over the last month there have been a number of people sounding warnings about coming changes that ESPs are going to have to deal with. There has been mixed reaction from various people, many people who hear these predictions start arguing with the speaker. Some argue that our predictions are wrong, others argue that if our predictions are right then the senders will just start acting more like spammers.
I have put together a collection of links from recent blog posts looking towards the future and how things may be changing.

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