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Get reading for SMiShing?

smishingI received my first phishing attempt via text message today. Apparently that’s called SMiShing, and it’s a thing. Sadly, I’m too busy to have the guy follow up with his promised phone call to try to get my Gmail password from me, but I did take a moment and report it to 7726, just in case that’ll do good to help protect somebody else in the future.
Also, apparently I have a G-Email account. Is that the kind of email account you get from the company who used to own NBC?
 

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Image Hosting on a Different Domain?

Fridays are a busy day in the land of deliverability, so I don’t have a lot of time to come up with a specific post for today. But, I thought this might interest folks here — the other day, a client asked me about using CDNs (content delivery networks) to host HTML email content, and I blogged up a quick reply over on my work blog.
(It’s true! Fridays are the new Mondays.)

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Spams, Scams, and Senders

Over on the Magill Report, Stephanie Colleton from Return Path shares her thoughts on how to tell whether or not an email message is legitimate.
Let’s add to that some more thoughts from Return Path’s Lauren Soares.
Then let’s add to that some of my own thoughts specifically for email senders.
Every company sending email today ought to:

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Pump-and-dump Spam is Back!

Commtouch’s latest “Internet Threats Trend Report” suggests that penny stock spam has returned:

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AOL Updates Spam Filtering

Over on the AOL Postmaster blog, Lili Crowley announced yesterday that AOL has made changes to their spam filtering system. Specifically, more senders may be subject to blocking with CON:B1 errors. AOL’s website explains that CON:B1 errors indicate that an IP address is being  blocked “due to a spike in unfavorable e-mail statistics.” This strongly suggests that a sender blocked with a CON:B1 error message has a negative sending reputation. This is yet another data point as to how ISPs have been tightening up spam filtering and reputation requirements over the past few years. What you might have been able to deliver five years ago, you might not be able to get delivered today.

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SMS Spam is Down?

Cloudmark says, yes, SMS gift card spam is down, thanks to recent action taken by the Federal Trade Commission. Read more over on PC World. I’m very glad to see this. I ended up on the list of one of those spammers and they were driving me nuts. Thank goodness for Google Voice’s report spam functionality.
What can you do to stop SMS spam? If you use Google Voice, and the SMS messages are coming to your Google Voice number, just report it as spam inside of the GV interface. If it’s coming directly to your cell number, not via GV, then you can forward the message to 7726 (SPAM). It’s a clunky, multi-step process, however. And does it actually result in anything happening? Hard to say. I don’t yet have any proof that SMS spam reports to a provider are quick to result in blocking, as is the case with email spam. I suspect it still can’t hurt to report SMS spam, though. The more reports, the more likely a provider will be driven to take action.
 

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Palau: Spam Haven? No, but…

Over on his blog, John Levine offers up a review of the history of the .PW TLD (top-level domain). The context: Recently relaunched, .PW has perhaps immediately become a spam haven. John mentions that at least one receiver is already treating mail referencing .PW as “block on sight.” Incidentally, John’s not the only friend of mine complaining about a recent uptick of spam referencing the .PW TLD.
Based on what I’ve heard so far, my guess is that more, widespread blocking of mail referencing .PW domains seems likely.
Deja vu? It feels like .biz all over again.
May 6, 2013 update: John Levine adds, “I don’t think I’ll be unblocking mail from .PW anytime soon.”

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Oops? Path Texts Man's Entire Phonebook @ 6AM

(Hi! Al Iverson here. I’ll be guest blogging a bit while Laura and Steve are off dealing with stuff.)
Over on the BRANDED3 blog, Search Strategist Stephen Kenwright shares how social network Path sent text messages to everybody in his address book, very early in the morning on Tuesday, telling everyone that he had shared pictures with him on Path. Except, according to him, he hadn’t.
This even resulted in a number of odd, robotic voice phone calls to Stephen’s friends and family. Why? Because nowadays, when you send a text message to a landline, most phone companies convert it into a voice call. The phone rings, you answer it, and a robotic voice reads the text message to you. The functionality is a bit creepy, and I can imagine that it would scare the heck out of somebody’s grandparents.
Path is saying that basically the whole thing is user error, but I’m not sure that I’m convinced of that. Even if Kenneth somehow missed this option at install time, Path likely needs to make this feature much more clearly opt-in and ensure that users know what they’re getting into. Right or wrong, if it keeps happening, it’s going to lead to more negative press and perhaps even new scrutiny from the FTC. You don’t mess around with SMS permission.

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Temporary Hiatus

Had a family emergency so the blog will be on hiatus for a couple weeks.

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SNDS is back

For years now, Microsoft has maintained Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) for anyone sending mail to Hotmail/Outlook/Live.com. This is a great way for anyone responsible for an IP sending mail to hotmail to monitor what traffic Hotmail is seeing from that IP address.
This morning I got up to a number of people complaining that logins were failing on the website and the API was down. I contacted the person behind SNDS and they confirmed there was a problem and they were fixing it.
Sometime this afternoon it was possible to login to the SNDS interface again, so it looks like they did fix it.
A bit of a warning, though, don’t expect to see any of the data from the last few days. There seems to be something with SNDS that means that when the service is down data isn’t collected or available. In the past when there have been problems, older data was not populated when the service came back.

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