Lost in Reception

I haven’t previously noticed Building Web Reputation Systems, a quote from Schneier about a Sims Mafia alerted me to it:

“Hi! I see from your hub that you’re new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house.”

Needless to say, the assumptions that the article as a whole works from are too simple to build a useful system from, but the Sims story illustrates on important point; the errors that beginners make in this area are causing actual harm to people and businesses. Getting workable solutions into the real world is becoming increasingly important and urgent.

Interesting article by J. D. Falk on the difficulties of bulk email and an argument that it may be a bad idea even for legitimate senders.

A breakdown of different failure modes for DKIM and their relative prevalence, as seen by Cisco’s email infrastructure: Common Errors Causing DKIM Verification Failures

Much that lines up with my own experience from John Levine: How do you test spam filters?

We’ve decided that certain filtering methodologies are simply unacceptable, such as, rejection notification by bounce rather than SMTP reject.

Quite.