It always surprises me how companies which try to present an image of good email practices (i.e., don’t spam) let their standards slip so easily, and their reputations with it. In June 2003 I signed up for Click2Asia, an online dating service for ethnic Asians (no I’m not Asian, but I figured living there for … Read more
Here’s a new anti-spam service which takes a somewhat different approach. RI-based Mail Cruncher works, not by looking at content, but by rating emails according to the reliability of their sender. “In business, I decide to trust other companies based on how long they have been around, their location, who else does business with them, … Read more
Interesting to see how phishing has become a threat in its own right, along with viruses and spam, and is becoming part and parcel of ‘security solutions’ offered by the Internet messaging industry. Take MailFrontier, for example, the Palo Alto-based “pioneer in email security and leading provider of anti-spam solutions” who today announced , today … Read more
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
Just when I started agonizing about the privacy aspects of MessageTag, a company has come along with a service that makes the mail-receipt monitoring service look like chicken-feed. MessageTag allows users to see whether and when their emails have been read by recipients. It does this by inserting what privacy advocates called a web-bug into … Read more