Al Iverson
Hey, as the weekend approaches, why don’t we celebrate the life of Trugoy from De La Soul, who passed away recently, by listening to the group’s fun song “A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays.” Enjoy.
As previously suspected and expected, internet security company Cyren will be liquidating.From their recent 8-Q filing: “Following the Company’s unsuccessful efforts to sell its assets or raise more capital to continue its operations, on February 20, 2023, the board of directors of Cyren Ltd. (the “Company”) reached the conclusion that the Company is insolvent and lacks the funds to continue as a going concern. Accordingly, the Company’s board of directors resolved to cease all activities of the Company and its subsidiaries, terminate the employment of all remaining employees of the Company and its subsidiaries, apply for liquidation procedures of the Company in Israel by appointment of a third-party trustee, in accordance with applicable law, and commence applicable liquidation, assignment and/or insolvency proceedings for each of the subsidiaries of the Company.”MailChannels, Spamhaus and others are offering replacement service to those affected by the pending collapse of Cyren’s services. I talked about
The Register’s Thomas Claburn details a recently shared research paper exposing troubling examples of loopholes in email authentication, allowing bad guys to spoof messages via email forwarding. Thankfully, some of the potential loopholes reported have already been addressed by specific email service providers. Some might say “don’t share this, as we don’t want to give the bad guys more ideas,” but I think it’s important for everyone to read and understand potential limitations and/or bugs in how things are implemented today, so that we can focus on addressing those problems, sooner, rather than later.Click on through to read “If you’re struggling to secure email forwarding, it’s not you, it’s … the protocols” over at The Register. (Great title, though it’s not always the protocols — sometimes it’s the implementation thereof.)
Mashable’s Tim Marcin and others are reporting that a failure in Microsoft’s spam filtering has resulted in Outlook.com (Hotmail) users receiving a bunch of spam in their inbox unexpectedly. Meaning, something broke — a something that would have previously either blocked those messages or relegated them to the Junk Folder.I wasn’t able to confirm this myself; my personal and test Outlook.com addresses are too well protected from public view; meaning they’re not on any common spam lists. I’ve updated my website contact info to use an outlook.com account, so I’m sure I’ll start getting spam there soon. Maybe I’ll be able to observe this for myself. (Hey, that’s aliversonchicago@outlook.com, for all the spambots out there.)This could be causing a unique scenario or two. Not only are bad guys perhaps scrambling to send as much garbage as they can before the spam filter loophole is corrected, but for email sending platforms
It’s a simple matter of reputation logic. Lower engagement means you’re more likely to look like a spammer to the ISPs. High engagement means you’re more likely to be perceived as respectable (and more likely to get inbox placement). So, this might seem obvious, but not everybody knows, do they? Anyway, the tip is this: Encourage engagement by asking for replies. Ask for your user to provide you feedback, either by responding to your email messages or by encouraging them to click through to a survey or feedback form. Clicks and responses are both solid positive feedback. Boost the positive feedback and you boost your chances of getting to the inbox. ‘Nuff said.
Founded in 2006, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) is a messaging industry working group comprised of sending and receiving platforms, security companies and more come together to collaboratively address spam and internet security issues.Initially, the group was called “MAAWG” and focused on email and anti-spam. Over the years, their focus has expanded, thus the “3” reflecting growth from just “messaging” to “messaging, malware and mobile” in their mission. Anti-spam and security best practices for both senders and receivers (things like the right way to send mail without being a spammer, and the most appropriate ways to block spam) are just one of the common areas of discussion. Folks within M3AAWG also work together to address technical issues around email and messaging technology and emerging threats. (I say “email” a lot here as it’s really my personal focus. I’ve got friends who specialize in other areas as M3AAWG members
From 17:00 GMT on Feb 16th through 09:50 GMT on February 17th, spam filterer/security service Spamhaus suffered an outage that meant that “data included in the Data Query Service, Rsync, Spamhaus Intelligence API, and Border Gateway Protocol Firewall was not refreshed between these times.”The way most Spamhaus data is shared with the world allows for quite a bit of redundancy and resilience against downtime, in that DNS queries can be cached, DNS zones are handed out to and stored by different remote DNS servers. Meaning that while some of Spamhaus core systems may have been offline during this time, spam filtering continued unabated. They’re saying that their ability to make any updates (additions or removals) was effectively blocked during the downtime, meaning anybody waiting for removal from a Spamhaus list probably had to wait a bit longer for a response than usual. And also, perhaps spam filtering effectiveness was down
The other morning, I jumped in the car to make a Dunkin run before work, and turned the radio on to WLUW, the college radio station from Loyola University Chicago, located near home. Occasionally my old self tunes in to the college station to see what the kids are listening to nowadays. To my surprise and delight, the song they were playing was this one: “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by Saint Etienne, from fall 1991, from the album “Foxbase Alpha.” An album I probably purchased the week it came out, from Let it Be Records in downtown Minneapolis, because they were the place to find new and unique albums from the UK and Europe.No, in 1991, I did not know that it was a Neil Young cover. Enjoy.
Hey Klaviyo users! Here’s a simple thing you can do to help improve deliverability success when sending emails from Klaviyo.Klaviyo has this “dedicated sending domain” setting that relates to email authentication, specifically DKIM authentication. If you don’t turn it on, Klaviyo still authenticates your email messages, but you basically get authenticated as “one of the group of Klaviyo customers,” not as yourself.If you implement this “dedicated sending domain” fully, you basically end up authenticating mail as yourself, being seen by yourself at mailbox providers (in particular, Gmail) instead of just being seen as “one of the group of Klaviyo customers.”This is a domain reputation thing that makes it easier for Gmail and others to tell you apart from other senders. And if you send good and wanted mail, it’ll make that mail more likely to go to the inbox. It helps you stand apart from the crowd, in a good
The other day, I talked about the spam seemingly sent by a local aldermanic campaign here in Chicago. When I talked about this spam on Facebook, one of the folks pushing back attempted to lead me down an existential rabbit hole based on the theory that we just can’t know whether or not a given email message is spam. That it is literally impossible to know with absolute certainty whether or not a single email message is unsolicited. Which is yet another one of those (possibly) correct but (definitely) not very useful kind of responses. Let’s break it down.First, let’s get this out of the way. Yes, it’s absolutely true that there is no “this message is unsolicited” flag or email header in an email message, allowing anyone, at a glance, to immediately know, whether or not a given email message is spam or not.The recipient has a pretty good