Tag Archives: Challenge-response spam filtering

Didtheyreadit’s Response To Privacy Issues Part II

More on Alastair Rumpell’s response to my privacy concerns about his new email monitoring service, didtheyreadit.  (Here’s the first one.) I wondered how the email addresses harvested by Rampell would be used (These would include all emails sent from and to recipients via the service since as far as I can understand it didtheyreadit, unlike… Read More »

Didtheyreadit’s Response To Privacy Issues Part I

Further to my posting about Didtheyreadit, a service which allows the sender to know whether/when/where the recipient opened their email (and even how long they read it), here’s a response from the company’s owner and founder, Alastair Rampell, addressing my concerns about the serious privacy issues it raises. Alastair acknowledges “you are right in that… Read More »

Stopping Spammers and Scammers By Patrolling Their Shopfront

America’s new anti-spam CAN-SPAM Act is a great way to stop spam, so long as the spammer is legit. The problem is, most spammers aren’t. Mass.-based software company Ipswitch Inc. estimate that more than two-thirds of all spam is deceptive, meaning that spammers disguise the links to their website “behind unrelated graphics and pictures, or… Read More »

Could Social Clustering Be Used To Kill Off Spam?

We can relax: Boffins are now grappling with spam. Nature reports that P. Oscar Boykin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California, Los Angeles, have come up with a way to tackle at least half the emails we get, namely those we get from friends, colleagues, and anyone else either we know or the… Read More »

Subject Fields – A Way To Foil Spam?

What to put in the Subject field these days to avoid spam filters? Clive of collision detection (who, incidentally, wrote a first class piece about European virus writers for the NYT) points out that the spam “battle has now claimed its first linguistic casualty. It occurred to me yesterday that you can no longer send… Read More »