An anti-spam DNS blacklist – or DNS blocklist – is typically a list of IP addresses all of which have some trait or traits in common, usually having to do with their association with spam. Here is a more full explanation

Microsoft Corporation has been granted a patent on the “double click”. We kid you not.

Nokia has announced production of a celphone which allows you to project short text messages into the air via a series of LEDs. The Nokia 3220 takes advantage of a known quirk of human vision, which causes us to see rapidly sequenced images as one whole image rather than as…

Here’s an interesting twist on war-driving*: war cycling. [*For those of you not familiar with the term, ‘war-driving’ refers to the act of driving around, wifi-enabled laptop in hand (or on the seat or lap next to you), and finding unsecured wireless access points through which you can send email…

If you are one of the legion who think that Gmail is a privacy nightmare, then just be glad that you don’t live in Zimbabwe. According to a report by BBC News, the government of Zimbabwe has introduced a proposal which would require Zimbabwean ISPs to report email which is…

The question of whether or not to unsubscribe from unwanted email is a tricky one.

The BBC reports today that the California Senate has passed SB 1822, aimed at limiting Google’s ability to scan email coming in to the users of their Gmail system, and also limiting Google’s ability to archive and sell the resulting information. Now, Aunty is old enough to remember some real…

As many of you know, Aunty was one of the people blessed with a Gmail account early on (relatedly, she was also ‘blessed’ with everybody and their brother coming out of the woodwork asking her to please get them a Gmail account, too). After the initial testing, which you can…

In this exclusive interview, The Internet Patrol gets real with notorious spam king Scott Richter

We had a really proud moment here this week, when Senator John McCain said, during the Senate Commerce Committee Hearings on the effectiveness of CAN-SPAM to date, “If the FTC can’t find the spammers, it should do the next best thing: go after the businesses that knowingly hire spammers to promote their goods and services…” Senator McCain is referring to Section 6 of CAN-SPAM, which holds those who knowingly advertise in spam responsible just as if they had sent the spam themselves.

Here’s how to detect email spoofing by reading email headers, as well as a tutorial on how to read email headers.

You heard it from Aunty first – well, unless you’ve read the Reuters’ article. According to a Reuters report covering the testimony provided today by noted “Cajun Spammer” Ronnie Scelson to the Senate Commerce Committee, Scelson told the committee that he, and I quote, “has signed up for a “whitelist”…

Noted “Cajun Spammer” Ronnie Scelson, responsible for 30million pieces of spam a day by his own calculations, told the United States Senate Commerce Committee during testimony today that while he has given up his wicked spamming ways, and now complies with CAN-SPAM, if people don’t stop blocking his email he…

A 20-year-old man from Texas has been sentenced to 4 years for phishing, duping both PayPal and AOL customers into thinking that they had received email from those companies, inducing them to provide private information such as credit card and bank account numbers in order to keep their PayPal and…

The issue of “false positives” – good, wanted email being cast aside because it looks too much like spam, comes from a “tainted” IP address, or was simply erroneously reported as spam (and more than one ISP is guilty of making this way too easy for their users) is the bane of the commercial emailer’s existence. Even the purest of mailers now finds that the email they send experiences delivery failures of 5 – 10 – even 20% or more, the lion’s share due to overzealous or even moronic spam-filtering or reporting.