Recent Posts

GFI/SORBS considered harmful, part 3

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
In the last few days we’ve talked about GFI’s lack of responsiveness, the poor quality of their reputation and blacklist data, and the interesting details of their DDoS claims. Today we’re going to look at (some of) the fundamental problems with GFI’s procedures and infrastructure that cause those issues. Some of the subset of issues I’ve chosen highlight are minor, some are major, but they show a pattern of poor decisions.
SSL Certificates
When you use SSL on a web connection it brings you two benefits. The first is that it encrypts the connection between your browser and the webserver, so that it’s very difficult for anyone to watch or tamper with your interaction with that webserver. The second, more important, reason is to make sure that you’re talking to the webserver you think you’re talking to, to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks.
This security relies on you trusting the certification authority that issues the SSL certificate that the website uses. A website providing services to the public should always use an SSL certificate created by one of a small number of reputable certification authorities that are pre-loaded into all webservers as “trusted”. These SSL certificates are something that need to be be purchased, but they’re very inexpensive – less than ten dollars a year.

Read More

GFI/SORBS – a DDoS Intermezzo

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
I’ve been stage-managing for a production of The Nutcracker this week, so musical terminology is on my mind. In opera, the intermezzo is a comedic interlude between acts of an opera series.
This comedic interlude is about the “DDoS” – a distributed denial of service attack. What is a denial of service attack?

Read More

GFI/SORBS considered harmful, part 2

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
Yesterday I talked about GFI responsiveness to queries and delisting requests about SORBS listings. Today I’m going to look at data accuracy.
The two issues are tightly intertwined – a blacklist that isn’t responsive to reports of false positive listings will end up with a lot of stale or inaccurate data, and a blacklist that has many false positives will likely be overwhelmed with complaints and delisting requests, and won’t be able to respond to them – leading to a spiral of dissatisfaction and inaccurate data feeding off each other.

Read More

GFI/SORBS considered harmful

Act 1 • Act 2 • Intermezzo • Act 3 • Act 4 • Act 5
Management Summary, Redistributable Documents and Links
A little over a year ago the SORBS blacklist was purchased by GFI Software. I had fairly high hopes that it would improve significantly, start behaving with some level of professionalism and competence and become a useful data source, in much the same way that the SpamCop blacklist turned into an accurate, professionally run source of data after they transitioned from being a volunteer run blacklist to a service of IronPort.
GFI’s statement a year ago was:

Read More

Preferences pages

As often as I talk about how badly companies send mail, I think it’s always a good idea to highlight when I find companies doing good things.
Today’s example of a company making me happy is Sur la Table. I’ve been on their mailing list for quite a while and do enjoy the offers and information they send. With the advent of the holiday cooking season, though, they’ve massively increased their volume. 21 emails in September, 25 emails in October and 37 emails in the month of November.

Read More

Email attacks

Ken has an article up today about the ongoing attacks against ESPs and email marketers. In it he says:

Read More

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m still catching up from being out last week, so no blog post today. I do, however, have tart to share. Mostly. Sorta. We ate it all.

Read More

ESPs being targeted

There has been an ongoing, concerted attack against ESPs recently. Today ReturnPath published some of what is known about the attack.

Read More

Facebook Postmaster page

There’s still quite a bit of concern and worry about how the Facebook messaging platform is going to affect marketing. One thing that may help is the Facebook postmaster page. There’s all sorts of good information on those pages, reflecting the years of experience that their messaging team has in running large platforms.
Some points worth mentioning.

Read More

TWSD: SEO Spamming

It’s no secret that I get a lot of spam. It’s no secret that some catches my eye enough to actually write about it here. Today’s spam is an email that actually made me laugh, though. Somewhere, some gardening site paid a lot of money for search engine optimization and got ripped off.
We own the site samspade.org. It’s down now, victim of a major hardware crash, but this was a site with a number of tools for tracking spammers. This morning, I got email about SamSpade.

Read More
Categories
Tags