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Discussing Internet security in (mostly) plain English
A New Year's resolution worth keeping
I rarely, if ever, make New Year's resolutions. Even more rare is a resolution that I keep (except...
Author: tzink Date: 01/10/2007
Jim Cramer likes iPod over Zune
This post isn't spam-related, but Microsoft-related. I was watching Mad Money today and Cramer was...
Author: tzink Date: 01/04/2007
Cisco buys IronPort
I was going to write a post on the story that Cisco just bought IronPort, but Richi Jennings beat me...
Author: tzink Date: 01/04/2007
What happens if we blacklist a legitimate IP?
With the rise in botnets in the past year, some spam filters like to make use of blacklists in an...
Author: tzink Date: 01/03/2007
December not so good for spamming
December has not been the most prolific month for spammers. After seeing a huge increase in...
Author: tzink Date: 01/01/2007
Did our spam plummet with the earthquake in Asia?
Just checked out this article (hat tip to John R. Levine... I hope I'm using that term correctly...
Author: tzink Date: 12/28/2006
What percentage of mail is spam?
In my other post, I documented my discoveries that the majority of the mail that we see on our...
Author: tzink Date: 12/27/2006
Looking for some Mac blogging software
A couple of months ago I downloaded Windows Live Writer. As far as blog publishing tools go, this is...
Author: tzink Date: 12/24/2006
Spam traffic analysis - by volume
A little over a week ago, I posted that most of our IPs are either very spammy or very clean (as...
Author: tzink Date: 12/24/2006
Spammers jumping on the Vista bandwagon
I've seen cheap software spam pumped over our networks many thousands of times. Nice to see that...
Author: tzink Date: 12/21/2006
Spammers targetting their audience
I was reading the planet antispam RSS (thanks to my friend at IronPort for putting my blog on there)...
Author: tzink Date: 12/13/2006
Is customer feedback useful in determining spam effectiveness?
This past summer when the image-spam run began, our overall spam volume started to rise. With the...
Author: tzink Date: 12/12/2006
Uploaded a new avatar
I uploaded a new avatar to my user profile. It's an image of the most famous bounty hunter in the...
Author: tzink Date: 12/11/2006
Be skeptical of advertised spam blocking rates
Whenever I see rival companies boast about their spam-blocking rates, I have to be a little...
Author: tzink Date: 12/07/2006
New spam rules of engagement finally starting to sink in
Having been a spam fighter for over two years, and having watched spam evolve very quickly over the...
Author: tzink Date: 12/05/2006
Holiday spam a potential problem?
During the past six months, starting in July, the amount of spam we have seen over our networks has...
Author: tzink Date: 12/04/2006
Trapped on a ledge
This post is not spam-related, instead, it is the story of the time I nearly died while on a hiking...
Author: tzink Date: 12/02/2006
Return from the Southern Hemisphere
I have just recently returned from holidays, first in Australia and then in Fiji. I have some...
Author: tzink Date: 12/02/2006
Et tu, Gmail?
I have complained in the past that Yahoo's Spam Guard lets through a lot of spam. I used to say to...
Author: tzink Date: 11/24/2006
On the road again
You all may have noticed that I haven't written any blog posts for a couple of weeks now. That's...
Author: tzink Date: 11/24/2006
Are some days of the week spammier than others?
Further to my other post below, I decided to investigate whether or not some days of the week are...
Author: tzink Date: 11/09/2006
Want to make a difference? Try fighting spam
Microsoft is going through some revisions in its HR process. This is a story that has been reported...
Author: tzink Date: 11/09/2006
Are some days of the week better predictors of spam than others?
I recently decided to investigate whether or not some days of the week are better predictors of spam...
Author: tzink Date: 11/07/2006
More on spam analyst performance
In my last post, I mentioned that I was reading Dr. Steenbarger's blog on trader performance. Dr....
Author: tzink Date: 11/04/2006
Spam analyst performance
I was recently reading Dr. Brett Steenbarger's blog and started reading some of the historical...
Author: tzink Date: 11/04/2006
If spam were a stock, I'd want to buy it
Since the beginning of the year, the amount of mail that we process has doubled. The ramp up in...
Author: tzink Date: 11/03/2006
Maintaining a wiki
Those of us in the spam team have decided to create an internal wiki designed to house all of our...
Author: tzink Date: 10/31/2006
Happy Halloween (tomorrow)
I came across this Halloween Hangman flash animation game today. Have fun.
Author: tzink Date: 10/30/2006
Spamhaus woes linked to rise in spam?
I was browsing the web, looking to see how others were dealing with the problem when I came across...
Author: tzink Date: 10/28/2006
Lest it be thought we aren't doing enough...
During this latest spam glut, I would just like to mention that we, on the spam team, are working...
Author: tzink Date: 10/28/2006
We're not crying uncle yet
The month of October has been the highest ever in terms of overall volume. We set a record on on...
Author: tzink Date: 10/25/2006
Stock spammers playing around with payload
This is a trend I have noticed in the past week. Over the weekend I saw that stock spam had been...
Author: tzink Date: 10/23/2006
Funny line in a message
A friend of mine sent me a message the other day that was commenting on the Google buyout of...
Author: tzink Date: 10/21/2006
You know you've been processing spam a long time when...
As my faithful readers will know, I have long held an interest in stock trading and am constantly...
Author: tzink Date: 10/18/2006
More on image spam
This past weekend I was browsing the internet for image spam, I wanted to read a little bit about...
Author: tzink Date: 10/16/2006
What do you know? I was right (maybe)
I was browsing through my Oct 16 edition of Investor's Business Daily when I came across this...
Author: tzink Date: 10/16/2006
Speak of the devil...
The other day, I wrote a blog post about the possibility of instant message spam filtering. I...
Author: tzink Date: 10/02/2006
Golden Crosses Not So Golden
On Friday, Microsoft stock had a golden cross. A golden cross is when a stock's 50-day moving...
Author: tzink Date: 09/30/2006
Instant message filtering?
This is an idea that I have been thinking about for a while and that is the concept of instant...
Author: tzink Date: 09/28/2006
Don't answer the door... we know it's our neighbors
A couple of years ago, I can remember Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates saying that the problem of spam...
Author: tzink Date: 09/27/2006
And I thought we had problems
We here in Exchange Hosted Services get a lot of traffic over our networks, but it's nothing...
Author: tzink Date: 09/26/2006
Lousy blogging in the past week
I've been away on business the past week which is why my blogging has been sparse as of late. I hope...
Author: tzink Date: 09/24/2006
Parking a car
Recently, I stumbled across an email with a flash animation that challenges people at parking a car....
Author: tzink Date: 09/18/2006
Spam pays, but sometimes we catch up to you
This story reminds me of 2005 when Microsoft settled a case against Scott Richter, of opt-in real...
Author: tzink Date: 09/14/2006
Looks like Yahoo has changed their footer
Readers of my blog will know that I frequently complain about Yahoo's spam filtering service, Yahoo...
Author: tzink Date: 09/11/2006