One of the other web sites I subscribe to is Stratfor .  It's a global intelligence website and doesn't really have much to do with spam.  But I like politics so I read it.  They have some articles which you can get for free, but the better...

I'm not familiar with retail trends (which is made obvious by the fact that whenever I buy stocks in the retail sector I lose money) but I have observed an interesting spam phenomenon that has held true in each of 2006, 2007 and 2008.  The peak spam...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted three posts about security and back doors.  My point was that in computer systems, secret back doors are useful to certain people but inherently weaken the overall security of the system. Well, just yesterday, I drove...

There's an article on InfoWorld where Microsoft takes credit for taking down the Storm botnet.  To briefly summarize the article, Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool is designed to get rid of malware and spyware.  This tool is distributed...

A friend of mine sent me this link to a spoof of a 70's type B-movie starring a spammer, or rather, how to get a spammer.  I thought it was clever.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has described Facebook as a walled garden, that is to say, inside is very nice but only certain people can get in.  Facebook is based on trust, only friends can view your profile and not just any old person can talk...

InfoWorld recently released a report where they compared the effectiveness of various spam filters.  It's mostly about on-premise anti-spam appliances.  They do touch on hosted solutions but don't go into much detail.  At the end, they...

I've blogged about broken CAPTCHA's in the past, but I thought I'd touch on it again.  Websense is reporting on their discovery that a new botnet is breaking Hotmail's CAPTCHA in order to send out spam.  It really is a nice report and demonstrates...

I just posted on e360 losing its case against Comcast, so I thought I would look a bit into Comcast's defense, available at this link here . e360 had a long list of allegations against Comcast.  Many of them were answered by Comcast saying "Comcast...

I'm always the last spam blogger to comment on these legal cases.  I'll continue in that tradition by throwing in my two cents.  SpamSuite has a copy of the ruling which is only seven pages long.  Some highlights from the document: Plaintiff...

Continuing on from my previous posts, I thought I'd talk a bit more about one of the hallmarks of my designs - the ability to override automated algorithms. As a stock trader, there are two types of systems.  Mechanical trading and discretionary...

Following on from my previous post, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the designs of the projects that I am in charge of.  Now to any of my Microsoft superiors who may be reading this post, fear not.  I have never put any security back doors...

The other day I was talking to one of our new Program Managers who comes from a computer security company.  I jokingly said to him "Great!  We use your products, now you can tell us all the back doors to get around your product's security...

One of the reasons I sometimes refer to Safe Senders is that there is a misconception, I believe, that with enough Safe Senders you can become more aggressive on spam. This might sound good in theory but it doesn't work in practice.  In fact, it...

Following up from my previous post , how do we do safe senders?  On the MAIL FROM in the SMTP conversation?  Or the one in the message headers?  The message headers is more intuitive but there are drawbacks. Consider the SMTP protocol. ...