Right, so we’re busy doing some top secret email stuff in the office relating to client support and generally being more efficient when it comes to queries and stuff. And part of this testing involves the transmission of emails that needs to comply with RFC specifications, and generally having the correct headers and content in it, blah blah blah. All good fun. And then this gem landed in my inbox (tracing the Received headers reveals it was Stephen – perfectly spoofed in every other way from Darth.Vader.This.is.legit@gmail.com, quite a mean feat seeing that I haven’t yet received spam from professional fraudsters that managed this):
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Archive for the ‘Email’ Category
We should be glad Darth Vader isn’t a spammer
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Email Archiving
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009So recently this topic came up again in the office. And with clients. And I came to realize exactly how sticky this problem really is. The requirements companies generally has is something down the lines of:
We want all email to be archived, and we don’t want anybody to have access to it. Not even the mail admins, and yet, they want the archives to be available on demand.
The irony is that your email admins can probably do significantly more damage than you think. For example, it’s dead easy to BCC all incoming email from your CEO to him/herself.
So from the outset there are legal issues surrounding email archiving, when are you allowed to archive (monitor) and when not. Who’s allowed to have access to these archives and who not? To what extent does your policies cover your proverbial legal ass, and to which extent does your archive solution need to be immune from it’s administrators (without hampering their ability to perform their work). These types of questions are strictly speaking not even technical – and trust me, when it comes to legalize I’m the last person that should be asked about these things.
I prefer the technical side of this challenge. And when it comes to email archiving there’s a few.
Direct Marketing Association – South Africa
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009Whilst recently trying to track down yet another South African spam source I got directed to the DMA SA. Whilst the majority of spammers are not members of this association I’m pretty sure that this may help. The reason I say most is because I’ve dealt with my fair share of them (and even had some as clients), and this is the first time I got pointed to the DMA SA website at http://www.dmasa.org/ – a rather informative website.
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Stripping attachments out of email
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009So I developed the need to strip attachments out of emails … or rather, to get hold of the attachments and store them to disk. A lot of googling later only one solution seemed to surface and seeing that I couldn’t get at metamail’s homepage and thus the packages I had to go another root. So after posing the question in #glug.za on FreeNODE python once more came up. This time I decided to just take the plunge and write some python …
