Reports today say that Salesforce is buying Exacttarget for around 2.5 billion dollars.
The offer for $33.75 per share in cash is 53 percent more that ExactTarget’s closing price yesterday. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, according to a statement today.
No one, it seems, is immune from account compromise attempts. Today Google reported they had identified a systemic campaign to compromise Gmail accounts belonging to “senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.”
Google offers a number of solutions for users, including the ability to add 2 factor authentication to your Gmail account. I strongly recommend anyone who uses Gmail to do this.
This isn’t a security blog, but email is one of the major vectors used to infect machines. We’ve seen numerous break ins targeting email senders and ESPs, resulting in customer and recipient data being stolen and then used for spam. Everyone who uses email needs to be aware of the risks and maintain their email account integrity. Be careful clicking links in emails. Be careful opening webpages. Keep your antivirus software up to date.
Everyone is a target.
I wrote earlier this week about bad ways to evaluate and choose an ESP. It was all going to end today in an insightful and profound post telling all of you exactly how to find the best ESP.
Then Smartinsights published an insightful and useful article on choosing an ESP yesterday.
So, yeah, just go read what Jordie has to say. I have a couple other things to add, but I’ll drop those in another post.
One of the things that is most frustrating to me about sending in spam reports is that many ESPs and senders don’t actively monitor their abuse address. A few months ago I talked about getting spam from Dell to multiple email addresses of mine.
What I didn’t talk about was how badly broken the ESP was in handling my complaint. The ESP was, like many ESPs, an organization that grew organically and also purchased several smaller ESPs over the course of a few years. This means they have at least 5 or 6 different domains.
The problem is, they don’t effectively monitor abuse@ for those different domains. In fact, it took me blogging about it to get any response from the ESP. Unfortunately, that initial response was “why didn’t you tell us about it?”
I pointed out I’d tried abuse@domain1, abuse@domain2, abuse@domain3, and abuse@domain4. Some of the addresses were in the mail headers, others were in the ESP record at abuse.net. Three of those addresses bounced with “no such user.” In other words, I’d tried to tell them, but they weren’t accepting reports in a way I could access.
Every ESP should have active abuse addresses at domains that show up in their mail. This means the bounce address domain should have an abuse address. The reverse DNS domain should have an abuse address. The d= domain should have an abuse address.
And those addresses should be monitored. In the Dell case, the ESP did have an active abuse@ address but it was handled by corporate. Corporate dropped the ball and never forwarded the complaint to the ESP reps who could act on the spam issue.
ESPs and all senders should have abuse@ addresses that are monitored. They should also be tested on a regular basis. In the above case, addresses that used to work were disabled during some upgrade or another. No one thought to test to see if they were working after the change.
You should also test your process. If you send in a complaint, how does it get handled? What happens? Do you even have a complaint handling process outside of “count and forward”?
All large scale senders should have appropriate abuse@ addresses that are monitored. If you don’t, well, you look like a spammer.