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Don’t fret! If you received an email from Amazon warning about gift card fraud that seems to imply that you recently purchased a gift card for Amazon, Google Play, or some other store, you’re not alone. Amazon glitched and seems to have sent a bunch of these notifications out, to people who have indeed NOT purchased a gift card recently.The email read:Dear Amazon Customer,Thank you for purchasing Google Play gift cards from Amazon.com.We would like our customers to be aware of some important information relating to purchase of Google Play gift cards.There are a variety of scams in which fraudsters try to trick others into paying with gift cards from well-known brands. To learn more about some common scam attempts that may involve asking for payment using gift cards please click on the button below, or alternatively contact us now.Some versions of the email referenced Google Play (as did my
Amazon is hiring! Want to work on Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES), one of the biggest email sending engines out there?They’re looking for the right person to fill the role of Email Deliverability Manager, Amazon Simple Email Service.In that role, you would “leverage data to build insights about email deliverability for SES customers, work closely with SES engineering, operations, sales, and marketing to help design and build scalable tools and features that can manage and analyze billions of messages for maintaining deliverability excellence and deliver a great experience to thousands of customers, relentlessly advocate responsible email sending and educate internal stakeholders as well as external customers,” and more.Read more and/or apply here.I am told that remote is NOT a possibility for this role, unfortunately.
Hey, email nerds! Are you like me, running various random EC2 instances with scripts or applications that do a bunch of spam and email message analysis, checking (among other things) all the domains and IPs you find? Okay, there aren’t millions of us, but I know I’m not alone out there! Email nerds unite! Anyway, if you’re querying Spamhaus’s blocklists directly from your AWS-hosted infrastructure, be aware: Beginning October 18th, Spamhaus is likely to block those queries, responding instead with a 127.255.255.254 response code. Why? It sounds like AWS is a large source of traffic for Spamhaus, and it’s hard for them to sort out who’s who– including who should be getting access for free and who shouldn’t be. Don’t fret, though. Just sign up for the Spamhaus Data Query Service (DQS), and you should be able to keep the access flowing.Is this really surprising at this point? Not to me.
This is a bit of a random post, with a bit of a random data point, but it surprised me and I thought those who send via SES might want to know. Because I am not entirely sure that it’s well known.On the Amazon SES FAQ page, they answer the question, “Can my email deliverability affected by bounces or complaints that are caused by other Amazon SES users?”The answer is basically, “mumble mumble, no not really, but.” (They don’t really address the potential for shared IP reputation issues; and I’m not sure I want to pick at that scab here. Maybe in a followup post.)The interesting bit is this, though:An exception to this rule occurs when a recipient’s email address generates a hard bounce. When a recipient’s email address generates a hard bounce, Amazon SES adds that address to a global suppression list. If you try to send an email…