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Yahoo turns on images by default for RP certified IPs

ReturnPath announced today that images and links from Return Path Certified senders are turned on by default in the Yahoo mail interface. This affects many of the other domains using Yahoo for mail hosting including Bellsouth, SBC, Rogers, BT Internet and Rocketmail.
Overall, I think this is something that Return Path can be proud of. Yahoo fiercely protects their users’ inboxes. They have even gone so far as to cancel contracts with certification companies when the level of certified clients was not to their standards. I have no doubt that this decision was made by looking at the quality of customers that Return Path are certifying and deciding that the certification is a meaningful and useful measure of the mail.
This speaks to the time and effort Return Path commits to both the initial certification process and the ongoing monitoring and compliance processes.

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GFI/SORBS considered harmful, part 3

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
In the last few days we’ve talked about GFI’s lack of responsiveness, the poor quality of their reputation and blacklist data, and the interesting details of their DDoS claims. Today we’re going to look at (some of) the fundamental problems with GFI’s procedures and infrastructure that cause those issues. Some of the subset of issues I’ve chosen highlight are minor, some are major, but they show a pattern of poor decisions.
SSL Certificates
When you use SSL on a web connection it brings you two benefits. The first is that it encrypts the connection between your browser and the webserver, so that it’s very difficult for anyone to watch or tamper with your interaction with that webserver. The second, more important, reason is to make sure that you’re talking to the webserver you think you’re talking to, to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks.
This security relies on you trusting the certification authority that issues the SSL certificate that the website uses. A website providing services to the public should always use an SSL certificate created by one of a small number of reputable certification authorities that are pre-loaded into all webservers as “trusted”. These SSL certificates are something that need to be be purchased, but they’re very inexpensive – less than ten dollars a year.

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GFI/SORBS considered harmful, part 2

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
Yesterday I talked about GFI responsiveness to queries and delisting requests about SORBS listings. Today I’m going to look at data accuracy.
The two issues are tightly intertwined – a blacklist that isn’t responsive to reports of false positive listings will end up with a lot of stale or inaccurate data, and a blacklist that has many false positives will likely be overwhelmed with complaints and delisting requests, and won’t be able to respond to them – leading to a spiral of dissatisfaction and inaccurate data feeding off each other.

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