LinkedIn addresses frequency issues

Yesterday LinkedIn announced they’re decreasing the amount of mail they’re sending to users.

For every 10 emails we used to send, we’ve removed 4 of them. Already, member’s complaints have been cut in half. And this is just the beginning. Less Email from LinkedIn

This is good news for a lot of people, as LinkedIn’s sending practices have always been aggressive. The send a lot of mail and not everyone likes that. They’ve been the butt of late night jokes, as they even acknowledged in their press release about decreasing emails. John Oliver of The Daily Show congratulated LinkedIn for “seem[ing] to have monetized irritating people!”
Twitter is rife with jokes about stopping mail from LinkedIn.

Unsubscribe from LinkedIn
Delete email account
Sell house, live in woods
Find bottle in river
Has note inside
It’s from LinkedIn
@darlyginn

Github has code to make it possible to “unsubscribe from all LinkedIn” emails.
The Daily Mash once opined the only way to leave LinkedIn is to destroy the LinkedIn headquarters.
The problem isn’t that LinkedIn sent so much mail. The problem is they sent so much unwanted email. I don’t know if this was causing them widespread delivery problems, although some indications are that the mail was bulk foldered for some Gmail recipients.
Listening to recipients is an important part of an effective email marketing program. Recipients tell you what they want, and what they don’t want. Sending too much email is ineffective and may result in delivery problems. I’m glad LinkedIn finally heard their users.
How much mail are you sending? And have you hit the downside of the curve?

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Compromising a Mail Client

Your entire work life is in your work mail client.
All the people you communicate with – co-workers, friends, family, vendors, customers, colleagues.
Every email you send. Every email you receive. Any files you attach or receive.
If someone can compromise your mail client, they can see all that.
They can save copies of all your emails, data-mine them and use them for whatever purpose they like. They can build a view of your social network, based on who you exchange emails with, and a model of who you are, based on what you talk about.
That companies like Google do this for “free”, advertising supported webmail shouldn’t be much of a surprise by now – but your corporate email system and your work email is secure, right?
What if an attacker were to set up a man-in-the-middle attack on your employees? Install malware on their iPhone, such that all traffic were transparently routed through a proxy server controlled by the attacker?
Or they could use a more email-centric approach, configuring the compromised mail client to fetch mail from an IMAP server controlled by the attacker that took the employees credentials and passed them through to their real corporate IMAP server – that would let the attacker completely control what the compromised user saw in their inbox. As well as being able to read all mail sent to that user, they could silently filter mail, they could deliver new mail to the users inbox directly, bypassing any mail filters or security. They could even modify the contents of email on-the-fly – adding tracking links, redirection URLs or injecting entirely new content into the message.
Similarly, the attacker could route all outbound mail through a man-in-the-middle smarthost that copied the users credentials and used them to send mail on to their real corporate smarthost. As well as being able to read and modify all mail sent the attacker could also use that access to send mail that masqueraded as coming from the user.
Sounds like the sort of thing you’d expect from criminal malware? Not quite. What I’ve just described is Intro, a new product from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn will be asking your users to click on a link to install a “security profile” to their iPhones. If they do, then LinkedIn will have total control over the phone, and will use that to inject their SMTP and IMAP proxies into your users mailstreams. The potential for abuse by LinkedIn themselves is bad enough – I’ve no doubt that they’ll be injecting adverts for themselves into the mailstream, and their whole business is based on monetizing information they acquire about employees and their employers. But LinkedIn have also been compromised in the past, with attackers stealing millions of LinkedIn user credentials – if they can’t protect their own users credentials, I wouldn’t trust them with your employees credentials.
You might want to monitor where your employees are logging in to your servers from – and suspend any accounts that log in from LinkedIn network space.
Edit: Bishop Fox has looked at Intro too, and come to similar conclusions. TechCrunch too.

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New unsubscribe methods in the news

The folks at The Daily Show, who brought us the wonderful term “High Volume Email Deployer” so very long ago, are once again leading the way in new unsubscribe technology. Unsubscribe by television.

Meanwhile, the folks at The Daily Mash have a different unsubscribe suggestion.

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LinkedIn shuts down Intro product

Intro was the LinkedIn product that created an email proxy where all email users sent went through LinkedIn servers. This week LinkedIn announced it is discontinuing the product. They promise to find new ways to worm their way into the inbox, but intercepting and modifying user mail doesn’t seem to have been a successful business model.

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