All About Email

What if someone says they sent me a message but I didn’t get it?

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

We commonly receive questions from users who tell us an expected email has not arrived, and they don’t know how to go about finding it.

Fortunately, with proper information and the right approach, it’s not really that hard to track down missing email messages.

Like snail mail, email follows a path from the sender to the recipient and problems can arise along the way. When a package or letter hasn’t arrived, it doesn’t make much sense to start yelling at the mail carrier; instead you have to start at the beginning and follow the message from point to point.

Following the chain of possession, the most common causes of missing email are as follows: more »

Tags: email, email clients
Posted in All About Email, Message Control | Comments Off

Endless Spam from Earthlink

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

It’s hard to estimate how many Earthlink user accounts have been compromised at any given time, but the endless drip-drip-drip of spam from Earthlink’s servers speaks volumes.

Either the infiltration is significant, or it’s just that Earthlink’s email security, monitoring and controls are either completely ineffectual or non-existent.

The endless drone of Earthlink spam continues with terse “familiar” sounding subjects such as:

Tags: fraud, scam
Posted in All About Email, Spam Tactics | 1 Comment »

OnlyMyEmail Sets Records in the VB Spam Challenge

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

The results from OnlyMyEmail’s fifth participation in the Virus Bulletin VBSpam Challenge have been released.

For the fifth time in a row, OnlyMyEmail’s MX-Defender stopped more spam than any of the other 18 competitors. The MX-Defender allowed only 2 spam messages out of 291,304 total, for a new record spam filtering capture rate of 99.9993%.

View the complete VBSpam Competition Results PDF

Tags: email, spam
Posted in All About Email, Spam News | Comments Off

OnlyMyEmail Receives Highest Score Ever in the Virus Bulletin Spam Challenge

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

The results from OnlyMyEmail’s fourth participation in the Virus Bulletin VBSpam Challenge have been released.

For the fourth time in a row, OnlyMyEmail’s MX-Defender stopped more spam than any of the other 19 competitors, missing only 2 spam messages out of 72,008 for a record spam filtering capture rate of 99.9972%. This phenomenal capture rate, combined with zero false-positives, earned OnlyMyEmail’s MX-Defender the highest score ever awarded since the Virus Bulletin Spam Challenge began testing two years ago.

View the complete VBSpam Competition Results PDF .
more »

Tags: email, spam
Posted in All About Email, Spam News | Comments Off

OnlyMyEmail Tops Virus Bulletin Challenge Spam, Again

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

For the second time in a row, OnlyMyEmail’s Corporate MX-Defender has been proven to stop more spam than any other solution in the Virus Bulletin VBSpam Challenge.

In the latest anti-spam challenge, 20 filtering solutions were compared using a live email stream over 15 consecutive days. Once again, OnlyMyEmail’s spam capture rate was the best of all, allowing just 16 out of 89,027 junk emails for a record setting 99.9820% spam filtering rate.

Even more impressive, several of the few emails that were allowed were recognized by OnlyMyEmail as “direct marketing” and in the real world would have been either allowed or blocked based on end-user preferences.

For comparison, 7 of the solutions missed more than 500 spam messages and 2 even allowed delivery of more than 1,000 pieces of junk email.

In all, OnlyMyEmail accurately stopped more spam than any of these other competing solutions: Anubis, BitDefender, FortiMail, GFI VIPRE, Kaspersky, Libra Esva, McAfee Email Gateway, McAfee EWS, MessageStream, Pro-Mail, Sophos, SPAMfighter, SpamTitan, Symantec Brightmail, The Email Laundry, Vade Retro, Vamsoft ORF, Webroot and Spamhaus.

Tags: spam
Posted in All About Email, Spam News | Comments Off

What Are False-Positive Emails?

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

When spam filtering systems block the delivery of a legitimate email, this is referred to as a “false-positive” result.

As it turns out, doing a good job of stopping Spam is not nearly as difficult as avoiding false-positives results. Eliminating false-positives is the most difficult problem for email recognition and filtering technologies, and is what separates the better mail filtering solutions from the rest.

A realistic expectation is that every useful spam filtering system or technique will create false-positives, and especially with regards to automated notifications, mass-mailed commercial newsletters and “legitimate” direct marketing messages. more »

Tags: false-positive, semi-legitimate marketing
Posted in All About Email | Comments Off

Virus Bulletin Spam Fitlering Comparative Review – OnlyMyEmail Has Highest Capture Rate

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

Virus Bulletin has included OnlyMyEmail’s Corporate MX-Defender for the first time since VBInfo began their spam filtering challenge back in 2009.

In all, 20 filtering solutions were compared in the latest test and OnlyMyEmail’s capture rate bested them all with a record capture rate of missing just 7 out of 92,606 junk emails.

That represents an astounding filtering rate of 99.9924% and, unlike tests and analysis published by others, this review was based on a live stream of email and not a static (and dated) corpus of test emails.

The next best blocking rates achieved by the next five contestants missed 29, 45, 51, 73 and 100 junk emails respectively. Four of the least effective spam filters missed more than 1,000 spam emails each.

Tags: spam
Posted in All About Email, Spam News, Spam-Stats | Comments Off

Miss Freya and the Taliban Virus

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Today, in the “more proof that there’s nothing new under the sun” category, we’re going to discuss the Taliban Virus.

The so-called “Taliban Virus” is a MANUAL virus. A manual virus requires you to voluntarily damage your computer because the virus is not sophisticated enough to do it by itself.

Yes, this is a joke. more »

Tags: botnet, funny, viruses
Posted in All About Email, Message Control, Spam Tactics | 8 Comments »

Show Me the Way to the Next Status Bar

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “status bar”, you might think it’s a nightclub that makes you feel important. Badump-bum-tsh.

Nope. Status bars don’t serve alcohol.

Now that that’s out of the way. Let’s look at what a status bar really is. more »

Tags: browsers, phishing, spam, status bar
Posted in All About Email | Comments Off

Wells Fargo Bank Security Alert – Phishing Example

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

This phishing attempt is a nearly perfect textbook example so we’ve decided to use it to highlight some of the usual characteristics of this type of email fraud.

If you arrived here after receiving a copy of this message you are right to be suspicious. We’re not sure what triggered your suspicion but here’s something that should definitely set off your inner fraud detection alarms . . . more »

Tags: email, email clients, fraud, phishing, phishing invitation, spoofing
Posted in All About Email, Phishing Lessons | 2 Comments »