The Blighty Flag

Back in the dark ages (the late ’90s) most people used dialup to connect to the internet. Those people who had broadband could run all sorts of services off them, including websites and mail servers and such. We had a cable modem for a while handling mail for blighty.com.
At that time blighty.com had an actual website. This site hosted some of the very first online tools for fighting abuse and tracking spam. At the same time, both of us were fairly active on USENET and in other anti-spam fora. This meant there were more than a few spammers who went out of their way to make our lives difficult. Sometimes by filing false complaints, other times by actually causing problems through the website.
At one point, they managed to get a complaint to our cable provider and we were shut off. Steve contacted their postmaster, someone we knew and who knew us, who realized the complaint was bogus and got us turned back on. Postmaster also said he was flagging our account with “the blighty flag” that meant he had to review the account before it would be turned off in the future.
I keep imagining the blighty flag looking like this in somebody’s database.

That is to say, sometimes folks disable accounts they really shouldn’t be disabling. Say, for instance:

This was an accident by a twitter employee, according to a post by @TwitterGov


Twitter needs a blighty flag.

Related Posts

Let's talk CAN SPAM

CheckboxEarlier this week I posted about the increased amount of B2B spam I’m receiving. One message is not a huge deal and I just delete and move on. But many folks are using marketing automation to send a series of emails. These emails often violate CAN SPAM in one way or another.
This has been the law for 13 years now, I find it difficult to believe marketers are still unaware of what it says. But, for the sake of argument, let’s talk about CAN SPAM.

Read More

Mary Litynski Award winner Jayne Hitchcock

This morning the Messaging, Mobile and Malware Anti-Abuse Working Group announced the winner of the Mary Litynski Award.
Congratulations to Jayne Hitchcock of WHO@ for her work over the last 2 decades fighting online abuse and cyberstalking.
I’ve never actually met Jayne, but I do remember following her story in the late 90s. She started off trying to protect people from being scammed by Woodside Literary Agency. In return for her work to inform and protect people the principals of Woodside set out on a multi-year harassment campaign against her.
This was in the late 90s and the Internet was very new. There weren’t any laws. There weren’t really abuse desks. We had to protect each other. Law enforcement didn’t know what to do with problems. There weren’t any laws against harassment online. The word “cyberstalking” was created by a reporter when describing what was happening to Jayne.
Jayne has been a force for good online and she and her volunteers help people who are victims of abuse online and cyberstalking. She’s been instrumental in getting anti-cyberstalking laws passed and helping law enforcement understand why online abuse is an issue and that it should be addressed.

Read More

Mandrill changes

Last week Mandrill announced that they were discontinuing their free services and all customers would be required to have a corresponding paid Mailchimp account.

Read More