Category Archives: Spam

Oracle (née Sun) joins the club of companies who can’t keep their mailing lists secure

In September 2009, I registered as a developer at sun.com. When doing so, I used a tagged email address, i.e., an email address part of which was unique to my registration at that site. I’ve never used that particular email address anywhere else or published it anywhere. In January 2010, Oracle completed its acquisition of… Read More »

A study in contrasts: handling stolen email lists

I try to make a habit of giving out “tagged” email addresses to web sites when I sign up for accounts / mailing lists / whatever. For example, when creating an account at widgets.com, instead of just signing up as “jik@kamens.us”, I might sign up as “jik+widgets@kamens.us”. It ends up in the same mailbox regardless,… Read More »

Something is going right in the fight against spam

Zombie botnet connection attempts to my mail server have gone down by 51% in the past four and a half months. I’ve posted more about this on my spam page, but a picture is worth a thousand words: It looks like the good guys are successfully shutting down some big botnets!

Yad Sarah: Good work, bad fundraising

I periodically post about organizations which can’t handle one of these two simple requests: (1) don’t spam me; (2) don’t send me junk mail. If an organization is incapable of implementing effective policies and procedures to accommodate these two straightforward requests from donors, they are probably also incapable of implementing effective, efficient policies and procedures… Read More »