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.

Related Posts

Google Buzz

Google Buzz has garnered a lot of attention this week, most of it looking at the privacy implications of requiring users to opt-out of sharing information with anyone who’s ever sent them email.
WARNING: Google Buzz Has a Huge Privacy Flaw
Fugitivus Blog (possibly NSFW due to language)
A dangerous buzz and opt-in isn’t just for email
How Google Buzz just blew your psuedonym
Lifehacker has a number of posts about Google Buzz and how to reset your settings.
I’ve already seen tweets and social media recommending using the networks generated by Google Buzz for marketing purposes.
I’m not very impressed with what I’ve heard about Google Buzz and the total lack of control it gives people over sharing information. I used to be very open with my information online, down to identifying the lab I worked in. I then said something on Usenet that upset someone. That person spent the next 4 months harassing me by phone at work and at home, and even went so far as to dig up my boss’ home number and harass her at home. I’ll be honest it was a scary experience. Even though I knew my stalker was 1500 miles away and extremely unlikely to actually show up on my doorstep, I was still worried for my safety.
That experience made me a lot more cautious about what I share online and how much information I give to people. Google Buzz seems to take a lot of the control of my information away from me. Which is why you won’t find me participating in the Google social network.
UPDATE: And here we go: Win a free laptop by following Hubspot on Google Buzz

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News snapshot

  • The judge in e360 v. Spamhaus has denied Spamhaus’ motion for dismissal. However, the judge also ordered that the 16 new witnesses be stricken and capped damages at the original $11.7M. Mickey has the order.
  • Tuesday the FTC announced it had shut down a major spamming operation. I am not sure the results are visible yet, yesterday there were 2041 spams in one of my mailboxes yesterday versus 2635 a week ago.
  • The FBI announced today it had infiltrated and shut down a international carding ring. While not directly spam related the phishers and carders work together and some of them use spam.
  • Rumor has it that many mailers are seeing problems delivering to AOL the last few days. It seems that AOL is making adjustments to their filtering system. As when any ISP changes filter rules and weights, some of the people just skirting by see delivery problems. What people are hearing is that if they are seeing delivery problems at AOL they need to improve their reputation.
  • Last week Yahoo had another online workshop with the mail folks. They have published a transcript of the talk. I was at the talk and there were only a couple spam related questions.

donhburger: Why does Yahoo sell our email addresses to spammers?
YMailRyan: We absolutely don’t sell your addresses to spammers. No IFs, ANDs, or BUTs about it.
imintrouble: My mom keeps emailing em but I never get it and usually it ends up in my spam box. Why? How do I make this stop? She’s getting pissed that I’m not replying.
YMailTeam: Oh no! Be sure your Mom is on your contact list– this should help keep mom out of spam box and put her back into your inbox.
buergej: Just why do I keep receiving the same kind of spam from a series of what appear to be women day after day after day?
YMailCarl: Spam is, unfortunately a constant problem for anyone using email. The reason you are receiving these emails is because spammers have somehow gotten a hold of your email address and are mailing you their lovely messages. There are several things you can do to assist with this. First, continue to report these messages as “Spam” by clicking the button at the top of the email labled “Spam”. Note that you don’t need to actually look at the message to do this. When you report items as spam it lets Yahoo! know that messages originating from that person are likely spam. This not only helps you, but helps other Yahoo! users as well.
YMailCarl: Second, if the emails are from similar names, you can set up filters in your email account to block those names and send them to your trash or spam folder.
YMailCarl: Obviously these messages you are receiving are not from women trying to sell you products personally – the messages are typically generated by a script which will try to forge or “spoof” the originating address.
YMailCarl: We agree that Spam is a serious issue and have many resources dedicated to fighting this problem.
YMailCarl: You can find some additional information about fighting spam here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/abuse/index.html
donhburger: Why when I mark Emails as Spam do I continue to get emils from the same persons?
YMailMaryn: When you mark a message as “spam” from within your Inbox that moves the message to your Spam Folder. And all subsequent messages that are sent from that particular sender will not be delivered to your Inbox, but will be delivered to your Spam Folder.

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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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