New and Noteworthy in Messaging for 9/20/09

By Ben Gross
in

Campaign Monitor recently updated and reorganized its excellent Guide to CSS support in email clients. I find the logical groupings of the new guide make it even more useful. CSS support varies widely across mail clients, which makes Campaign Monitor’s guide is well worth examining for anyone designing HTML email messages that include CSS. A version of the guide with the ten most popular email clients is available in HTML, while a full version of the guide that includes 23 mail clients is available in PDF and Excel formats. Recent updates to the guide include MySpace Mail and seven mobile email clients. The mobile email clients roughly in order of CSS functionality are iPhone 3.0, Android, Android Gmail application, Palm Pre (WebOS), Palm Treo (Windows Mobile 6.5), Palm Treo (Palm Garnet OS), and the Blackberry.

In a post on Smarterware, Gina Trapani makes a good point that you should Never Use Inactive Webmail as Your Secondary Email Account. Trapini says that people often use a infrequently accessed webmail account or other secondary account when signing up with services out of fear that providing their email address might result in an increase in spam. The problem is that most free webmail services deactivate accounts that have not been used in a specified amount of time. Deactivation typically means that the service will begin bouncing mail to that account. After an additional amount of time the account may be deleted entirely and in some cases reassigned to someone else. This can have severe consequences as it did in the Twitter hack story since a deleted hotmail account was assigned as the recovery email address for the Twitter employees Gmail account. Thus the attacker simply registered the recycled Hotmail username and reset the Gmail account. The moral of the story is that you should only register accounts with email addresses you will be able to maintain control over time. If you do register an account with an infrequently used webmail account, put an entry on your calendar to log into the account every few months. People do regularly change primary email addresses and it is not a bad idea to periodically review the email addresses listed in your account information for important services.

Symantec’s latest Spam and Phishing Landscape: September 2009 report finds that while the overall volume of spam decreased two percent since the previous report, they still place the overall spam rate at 87%. Phishing attacks decreased by 45%. There was a 74% decrease in the use of phishing toolkits to automate the phishing process. Symantec hypothesizes this was largely due to the discontinuation of a specific toolkit that targeted a social network site. The discontinuation was likely caused by the shutdown of command and control servers for the toolkit.

Published September 20, 2009