Google
 

Archive for the ‘Spam and Email’ Category

SpamAssassin and My Spam Volume

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005

For quite some time I have been using the SpamAssassin installation provided by our provider to tag my business email account. However, only a few days ago did I actually set it to delete all emails that score over 10.0 server-side. Suprisengly enough, my spam volume dropped to almost a ...

SPF Project and Meng Wong

Tuesday, October 25th, 2005

Long buried within my inbox was an email from the editor of TrimMail's Email Battles regarding their exclusive interview with Meng Wong, the creator of SPF. Nothing new here - he recommends crypo-solutions in the long term like PGP or DKIM. There is also an interesting tidbit on using RSS for ...

On Comment Spam

Monday, October 24th, 2005

Since I upgraded to MT v3.2, the amount of comment and trackback spam has gone down, probably due to their blacklist lookup feature. However, since then two types of spam accounted for over 90 % of whatever got through: 1. Links to sites hosted by free adult webhosting sites called anzwers.net. 2. ...

New Testing tools for ARF

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

SkyList is providing two free tools for the developers of ARF software (ARF is Abuse Reporting Format which is a specification for email abuse reports I am wrote). The specification and details on testing tools can be found on my ARF page.

Why Google Isn’t Talking to Other Jabber Servers

Thursday, August 25th, 2005

Since the release of Google's IM application (powered by XMPP protocol aka Jabber) folks have been wondering why Google's Jabber server does not talk to other servers, just like mail servers do. After all, one of the key features of the XMPP protocol is federation which allows Jabbers servers to ...

SPF Files Appeal Against Sender-ID

Thursday, August 25th, 2005

(This comes from John) It seems that the SPF Community just lodged a formal appeal at the IETF against publication of Microsoft's Sender-ID specs. The issue at hand appears to be the fact that Sender-ID uses SPF records as a way to piggy back itself on the popularity of SPF records. I ...

IETF Approves SPF and Sender-ID

Friday, June 24th, 2005

According to the records in the IETF's database (here and here), both SPF and Sender-ID anti-spam proposals were tentatively approved by the IESG (the "approval board" of the IETF) as experimental standards RFCs. It remains to be seen whether any of them will actually put a dent into spam.

IETF Leaning Towards Approval of Both Sender-ID and SPF

Wednesday, June 15th, 2005

According to a tell tale list message from Ted Hardie (the IETF's AD for Applications), the IESG which is the governing body (somewhat) of the IETF, is leaning towards approval of both Sender-ID and SPF even though Sender-ID distorts the meaning of SPF records and results may differ. Their logic ...

Old ASRG Archives

Thursday, June 9th, 2005

After sitting on my desk for six months, I finally got around to posting some of the old ASRG email archives. They can be found here.

RSS vs. Mailing Lists

Wednesday, May 25th, 2005

Recently I have been observing myself switching slowly from mailing lists to RSS feeds for some of the many lists I am on. So far, I have established a principle that anything that I need to get via email can come via RSS instead if it is something that I ...