Ray Everett-Church

Amid new disclosures of rampant eavesdropping on Americans, including revelations of a Nixon-like list of reporters and anti-war activists targeted for special monitoring, many experts are expecting that the Obama administration will be a lot more privacy friendly than the crowd they replaced. In truth, however, it shouldn’t be difficult for the Obama team to […]

It may be a truism that “little things mean a lot,” but in the world of spam, flipping a single switch can have huge consequences that span the globe. We saw that concept reinforced this past week when McColo Corp., an Internet hosting firm based in San Jose, Calif., had its Internet connection shut off […]

In its decision last month to strike down their state’s anti-spam statute, the Virginia Supreme Court also threw out the criminal conviction of Jeremy Jaynes, one of the Internet’s most prolific spammers. As it turns out, neither event will make much difference to the amount of spam you’ll receive today, tomorrow, or at any time […]

The first step to recovery, they say, is to admit that you have a problem. So the ability to admit that everyone in my household has an unhealthy addiction to our Apple iPhones would seem to be a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the iPhone addiction is making my family, and all of our […]

With growth rates of spam, phishing, and email-borne malware showing no signs of abating, more and more ISPs and enterprises are implementing stronger protective measures. Many of these anti-spam techniques are well known to those of us in the email industry tasked with managing “deliverability” – the art and science of getting email delivered to […]

The last couple of weeks have been pretty bad for the folks over at the behavioral targeting and advertising company NebuAd. During some highly contentious hearings on Capitol Hill, it seems to have come as a shock and surprise to the executives at NebuAd that people might have a problem with having their Internet connection […]

This month’s Authentication and Online Trust Alliance (AOTA) Summit in Seattle showed how far the industry has come in understanding the value of authentication and trust-enhancing technologies. Unfortunately the event also highlighted how far the industry still needs to come in understanding the vital role that authentication needs to play in making online communications and […]

After four years of drafts and discussions, the Federal Trade Commission has approved the Final Rule – the enforceable implementing regulations – that say how the FTC will be enforcing the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM Act). The document issued last week by the FTC is 109 pages […]

After years of tweaking anti-spam filters on my personal email server, I have all but banished Nigerian dictators ads for “viagkra” from my mailbox. But almost every week I find dozens of emails, allegedly from various friends and business colleagues, exhorting me to join every new social networking site under the sun. As if the […]

Last month I wrote about the growing number of major corporations making use of email authentication to protect their online reputations from phishing, spam and other email-borne threats. Authentication provides email senders and receivers some additional ways of differentiating legitimate email from spam, phishing and other forms of fraudulent email that threaten the safety of […]