Hands off address books

Germany’s highest court has ruled that Facebook’s practice of harvesting email addresses from their users contact lists in order to send invitations to them constitutes “advertising harassment” and violates German law on data protection and unfair trade practices. This in response to a suit filed by the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV)

What the judgment means exactly for the current Friends Finder, we now have to find out. In addition to Facebook, other services use this form of advertising to attract new users. They must now probably rethink. — Klaus Mueller, head of the VZBV

Harvesting address books in order to send email to them has never been a good idea. This ruling suggests that it will be legally risky to do so anywhere in Europe.

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Protect your email with TLS

You probably use TLS hundreds of times a day. If you don’t recognize the term, you might know it better by it’s older name, SSL.
TLS is what protects your data in transit whenever you go to Google, or Yahoo or even this blog. The little padlock in your browser address bar tells you that your browser has used the TLS protocol to do two things. First, it’s decided that the server you’re connecting to really is operated by Google, or Yahoo or us – you’re (probably) not having your session intercepted by someone in the middle between you and the webserver, either to read your traffic or modify it en-route. Second, it is encrypting all the traffic between you and the webserver, so that it can’t be passively monitored while in transit. Because of concerns about ubiquitous surveillance many websites – including ours – are moving to use TLS for everything, not just for protecting a login page or a credit card number.
That’s great for the web, but how does it apply to email? One place it’s used is for connections between your mail client and your local mailserver – sending mail to the smarthost via [rfc 4409]SUBMIT[/rfc] and fetching mail using [rfc 2595]IMAP or POP3[/rfc] almost always use TLS. That protects the privacy of your messages between you and your ISP and also protects the username and password you use to authenticate with.
Mail traveling between ISPs didn’t used to be encrypted “on the wire” , but about 15 years ago [rfc 3207]an extension to SMTP was proposed[/rfc] that would allow ISPs to negotiate during each session whether they should encrypt it or not. This extension, often referred to as STARTTLS after the command it uses, allows gradual rollout of encryption of mail traffic between ISPs without requiring any sort of flag day. A mailserver that supports STARTTLS will tell everyone who connects to it “Hey! I support STARTTLS!”. When a smarthost that also supports it connects to that mailserver it will go “Great! I support STARTTLS too! Lets do this!” and convert the plain text SMTP session into an encrypted session protected by TLS.
Fifteen years seems like a long period in Internet time, but non-intrusive protocol changes can take a long time to deploy. Facebook Engineering have done the work to see how that deployment is going with their survey of the current state of SMTP STARTTLS deployment. The results are really quite positive – over three quarters of the mailservers they sent mail to supported STARTTLS, covering nearly 60% of their users. That’s definitely enough to make supporting STARTTLS worthwhile.
More about TLS and encryption tomorrow.

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Confirmation is too hard…

One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part.
I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm.
A couple years ago I was troubleshooting a problem. One of my client’s customer was seeing a huge percentage of 550 errors and I was tasked with finding out what they were doing. The first step was identifying the source of the email addresses. Turns out the customer was a Facebook app developer and all the addresses (so he told me) were from users who had installed his apps on Facebook. I did my own tests and couldn’t install any applications without confirming my email address.
Every Facebook user that has installed an application has clicked on an email to confirm they can receive email at the address they supplied Facebook. There are over 1 billion users on Facebook.
Clicking a link isn’t too hard for people who want your content. I hear naysayers who talk about “too hard” and “too much drop off” but what they’re really saying is “what I’m doing isn’t compelling enough for users to go find the confirmation email.”
This isn’t to say everyone who has a high drop off of confirmations is sending poor content. There are some senders that have a lot of fake, poor or otherwise fraudulent addresses entered into their forms. In many cases this is the driving factor for them using COI: to stop people from using their email to harass third parties. Using COI in these cases is a matter of self protection. If they didn’t use COI, they’d have a lot of complaints, traps and delivery problems.
The next time you hear confirmation is too hard, remember that over 1 billion people, including grandparents and the technologically challenged, managed to click that link to confirm their Facebook account. Sure, they wanted what Facebook was offering, but that just tells us that if they want it bad enough they’ll figure out how to confirm.
HT: Spamresource

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Facebook blocking spam: parallels to email filtering

Last month a Dangerous Minds posted numbers that indicated their Facebook posts were reaching fewer users.  They suggested that this was a conspiracy by Facebook to make more money and soak small publishers with “exorbitant” advertising fees. I didn’t pay that much attention to it. I use Facebook to communicate with friends. The only commercial entities I “like” or are “friends” with are small local businesses that I shop at.
Today, I see a tweet from Ben Chestnut that looked intriguing.

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