Plain English Technical Advice

Free Lap-Top?—I Don't Think So!!

This morning, I received the following email from one of my contacts:

Dear All

Ericsson are distributing free laptops for their brand promotion.

They are hoping to increase their popularity and sales with this campaign.

All you need to do is send an email about this promotion to 8 people
and you will receive an Ericsson T18 laptop. However if you send an
email to 20 people or more you will receive a Ericsson R320 laptop.

Kindly ensure that you cc to xxxx@xxxx.co.uk so she will know you
have sent the email.

In accordance with the instructions, this was copied to a number of the sender's other contacts whose email addresses were there for everybody to see.

As this was a 'forwarded' email, I could also see a couple of dozen contact addresses propagated by the previous sender in the 'chain'.

Apart from any other issue, distributing large batches of email addresses in this way will inevitably increase the volume of unwanted email received by each one—I regularly receive emails which reveal the sender's entire contact list which could easily be 'harvested' for marketing purposes.

Unless there is a specific reason for disclosing the identity of one recipient to another, you should always use the 'blind copy' (Bcc) facility available with most email services.

With regard to the original offer of a free lap-top, this is about "as realistic as a British MP's expenses claim".

What's happening here is known as a ‘Denial of Service’(DOS) attack—a mischievous attempt to  generate large numbers of emails which will clog-up the system generally and could well overwhelm the email servers of the named recipient (Ericsson, in this case).

Microsoft are also a regular target of this prank—for example, it is suggested that they will pay-out hard cash if you help to test the email system.

It’s also possible that passing-on this sort of stuff will come back to 'bite' you—with the growing use of automated anti-spam services, you could easily be identified as a source of unwanted email which might well result in all of your email being blocked or even the withdrawal of your internet service. 

Anti-Spam getting out of hand

Last week, I reported that Hotmail had blocked all email from Plusnet whose servers had apparently been 'blacklisted' for sending out 'spam'.

Following representations from Plusnet, this ban was lifted though Plusnet users were left unable to communicate with Hotmail users for something like 48 hours.

It may well be that some unwanted email was sent out via an individual Plusnet account but the entire user base suffered as an unintended consequence of the Hotmail anti-spam measures.

I had a similar problem several years back when I was unable to communicate with an important customer for several days because their spam-filtering service had blocked email from an entire Pipex server.

Plusnet themselves operate optional spam filtering which can either delete suspected email directly with the alternative of marking the item with [SPAM] included in the subject—I much prefer the second option because it identifies most (but not all) of the spam but still allows you to spot the occasional non-spam email.

Unfortunately, Plusnet have now introduced an initial filtering stage which deletes email based on the 'reputation' of the sender—this is exactly the kind of filtering which gave rise to Plusnet emails being blocked by Hotmail.

You don't actually get the chance to decide whether the items intercepted at this stage have been correctly identified as junk mail so the only way to prevent 'false positives' is to turn off spam filtering altogether.

Turning to my Typepad blogs, I have recently experienced some difficulty in setting up a new author and discovered, by trial and error (mainly error), that the recipient's domain name host (123-reg.co.uk) is apparently blocking administrative messages from Typepad.

A search of the 123-reg 'help' pages produced nothing about spam though there is a reference elsewhere to 'email defence' which appears to be non-configurable—i.e. you get it whether you want it or not.

According to 123-Reg, their email defence system is "one of the most comprehensive and effective email threat protection service on the market" which captures 98% of spam—as a confirmed cynic, I have to wonder exactly how they measure the 2% that escapes their notice and gets through.

It's a well--established fact that '83.75% of statistics are made up on the spot'.

In my experience, and despite multiple levels of anti-spam protection, most people still seem to get an awful lot of junk mail which, at the end of the day, is a bit of a nuisance but it generally doesn't do any harm—protection against malicious software is, of course, essential but that is a separate issue.

To read the earnest advertising of some Internet Service Providers, you would think that junk email has become one of the greatest threats to mankind, second only to 'global warming' and well-ahead of 'swine flu'.

With everybody jumping 'on the bandwagon' to blacklist everybody else, a far more-serious problem is the loss of email that you actually want.

Hotmail becomes NOTmail

Yesterday morning, I noticed that emails to Hotmail users were being 'bounced' with the following message:

The following message to xxxxxxxx@hotmail.comwas undeliverable.

The reason for the problem:
5.1.0 - Unknown address error 550-'SC-004 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, we recommend enrolling in our Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), a free program intended to help senders remove unwanted recipients from their e-mail list:

As I am not in the habit of sending 'spam' email which might give rise to complaints, I found this rather offensive as well as inconvenient.

One problem with this high-handed approach is that many Internet service providers including my own (Plusnet) do not allocate each user a fixed IP (internet address) but dynamically allocate a 'free' address when the user logs on.

Consequently, any user could be penalised as a result of unwanted email generated by another.

The problem could potentially be resolved by disconnecting from the broadband service and logging-in again.

In this case, however, it is the Plusnet mail server that was 'blacklisted' rather than an individual user as suggested by the misleading 'delivery status' message above.

According to the Plusnet 'service status' page, Hotmail acknowledged this problem yesterday and have agreed to remove the blacklisting in their own sweet time which is expected to be this afternoon.

Ironically, these sort of anti-spam measures have little effect on the serious bulk-emailers who don't stick around at the same address for long enough to be bothered by any blacklisting.

In my opinion, losing emails that you actually want is a far more serious problem than receiving junk which is a bit of a nuisance but does no actual harm.

If the Post Office started witholding paper mail that they didn't think you should have, they would most likely be prosecuted, so why should it be different for email service providers.