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Jul
12
Email Beyond English
Expanding beyond the initial English alphabet and characters was, and remains, a challenge for email systems.
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Categories: Explanation Standards View Comments
May
3
33 Years of Spam? No, Not Really.
Scattered around the Internet today (and every May) you’ll find various articles heralding the 33rd anniversary of spam, counting the years from Gary Thuerk’s message. They’ll remark that spam has been with us a long time, maybe quote a few anti-spam vendor statistics, and say spam isn’t going anywhere. But that’s just bad research.
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Categories: Commentary View Comments
Apr
26
Understanding the “Precedence:” Header
Though never formally standardized, the Precedence: header has been around since the earliest days of internet email. Google’s use of the Precedence: header for labeling is a new idea, and (probably) unique.
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Categories: Explanation Standards View Comments
Jan
4
Where Every Phisher Knows Your Name
Spear phishing is the unholy love child of email spam and social engineering. It refers to when a message is specifically crafted, using either public or previously stolen information, to fool the recipient into believing that it’s legitimate. Though not new, spear phishing has been increasing. It’s clear that the criminals’ techniques have evolved beyond technology-only attacks, and thus so must our protections and our paranoia.
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Categories: Explanation View Comments
Dec
2
Remembering the Good Times
The most effective early email-borne viruses didn’t need botnets. They didn’t change your computer settings, or steal your login credentials. And they somehow convinced regular users to help them spread.
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Categories: Explanation View Comments
Nov
18
“Delivered” Depends On Context
When an email sending system reports that a message has been ‘delivered,’ that may not be an accurate portrayal of the final destination of the message. To understand why that is, and why ‘delivered’ has been the term of art for so long, we just need to look at the email delivery process.
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Categories: Explanation View Comments
Oct
29
What Does It Mean to “Certify” Email?
In the certified email concept, what’s certified is that the sender of the message is following a set of standards or practices, and thus should be allowed to send the message. In the certified postal mail concept, what’s certified is that the message was successfully sent and/or delivered and/or received, depending on the level of service. The same word, applied to different aspects of the transaction, results in very different products.
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Categories: Explanation Standards View Comments
Oct
14
Validating Addresses in an Unbounded Namespace
Though they don’t always realize it, accuracy in domain names is important to end users when it comes to their email addresses — and it’s equally important to anyone who collects email addresses, for any purpose. Mistyped email addresses can have far-reaching consequences.
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Categories: Explanation View Comments
Sep
23
Catch More Spam with Zombies
Zombie email addresses are once-valid addresses which have been literally abandoned by their users, yet remain on marketers’ subscriber lists more or less forever. Spam trap operators we spoke to all agreed that it’s best if the address or domain reject all mail for a period of months or (preferably) years before being recycled as a spam trap.
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Sep
21
28 (or perhaps 148) Years of Rotating Your Head 90 Degrees
In September 1982, on a computer bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University, emoticons were born. It began with a theoretical physics problem involving a candle and a drop of mercury in a free-falling elevator.
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