MX Messaging Resources

MxToolBox launches Zimbra based email continuity solution

rachale — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:56:00 GMT

Austin, TX – April 30th, 2008 – MxToolBox today announced the immediate availability of a hosted Email Continuity service based on version 5.0 of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS).

The product, called Emergency MailTM Zimbra Edition (EmZ), allows businesses with an on-premise email system to run in parallel with hosted Zimbra servers.   Most popular business email systems including all versions of Microsoft Exchange are supported.

Copies of all email messages are backed up in real time on Zimbra servers hosted in highly redundant MxToolBox data centers. In the event of fire, natural disasters, or server failures, users can continue to communicate with each other and conduct business remotely without disruption simply by accessing their Emergency Mail account.

MxToolBox selected Zimbra, a Yahoo! company, to provide underlying mail server technology because of their best-of-breed anywhere access from virtually any device, and advanced mailbox search capabilities which are critical in a disaster recovery situation.

“We are excited about MxToolBox Emergency Mail Zimbra Edition, it’s an innovative use of Zimbra’s technology and solves a critical business continuity risk facing IT Managers,” said Scott Dietzen, Yahoo! vice president. “MxToolBox customers have access to a best-of-breed email and collaboration solution 24/7.”

The searchable Emergency Mailbox is always available to the end users via the Zimbra AJAX web interface.   Unlike more common replication systems, FlexBox routing technology from MxToolBox scales from businesses from a few users up to thousands, making it one of the first Email Continuity solutions cost effective for small business customers.

The system has already proven itself in real-world situations. John Autry, Manager of Information Systems for the City of Slidell in southern Louisiana notes “numerous times our exchange server has been down and everyone was able to still use their email with the emergency mail.”

MxToolBox founder Eric Rachal describes, “the real power behind our approach is that users can decide themselves when to use their Zimbra Emergency mailbox which means zero switchover time, and zero intervention by IT staff to engage or disengage the system.”    When the customer’s email server comes back up, copies of all messages during the outage are reconciled back with the customer mail server.

Because the system is always available, some IT managers are even using it to lessen the impact of planned downtime. “Major weekend upgrades becomes much less risky when your users never lose access to email,” Rachal notes.

MxToolBox had customers on an earlier version of the service in 2005 who were effected by hurricane Katrina. Some of those customers decided never to plug their mail servers back in, so this version also offers a seamless migration path to a fully managed Zimbra solution via drag and drop web interface.

The service is available immediately from MxToolBox on a monthly subscription basis with pricing starting at $1.99 per user.

Fixing ORDB Blacklist (ordb.org) Bounce Back Problems - Exchange

Peter LeBlond — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:17:00 GMT

If you are encountering problems with mail referencing ORDB.org on your Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 server, or mail being blocked with a return message stating that the sender's IP was on relays.ordb.org, please ensure that you do not have relays.ordb.org entry configured in the IMF settings. You MUST restart the SMTP Virtual Server to release this setting.

The ORDB was an open relay data base which listed open relays which has recently closed its doors. Most RBLS (real time blacklists) when they wish to dissolve will commonly blacklist the entire internet in order to get the attention of those people using them to stop attempting to contact their IPs.

For more information please see the ORDB Problems page on our support site.

MxToolBox Expands Options for IT Resellers

rachale — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:37:00 GMT

Austin, TX, United States, 02/05/2008 - MxToolBox, Inc.'s announces the launch of ServiceBox™, the first on-demand platform for automating Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery through the IT channel.

	The offering allows IT service firms and VARs to automate the acquisition, provisioning, support and billing of leading software service offerings. ServiceBox™ is the culmination of the firm’s five year track record of automating the delivery of email messaging and security services to small and mid-sized business. The firm currently has distribution relationships with leading vendors in the space. Current partners include Yahoo! (via their acquisition of Zimbra) and Google™ Messaging (via their acquisition of Postini). MxToolBox services thousands of businesses today, with hundreds of channel partners throughout North America. Company representatives describe ServiceBox™ as a powerful tool that integrates the entire on-demand IT service chain into an automated, simplified package. Partners and IT consultants, starting with a single customer order, can use ServiceBox™ to sell, support and bill their customers directly, or allow MxToolBox to handle selected portions. For larger partners, fully integrated support help desk and accounting modules streamline business operations, contract management, technical support and sales pipeline. “When we started selling software service offerings back in 2003, there were no tools to help automate business processes around recurring revenue streams. Everyone was still thinking in terms of SKUs and traditional distribution. Surprisingly, this is still the case five years later,” says Eric Rachal, CEO of MxToolBox. Rachal continues, “The supply chain and distribution channels behind SaaS are rapidly evolving into a complex mess. Vendors and OEMs are struggling to figure it out. Our goal is to make sure the customer never sees that.” MxToolBox is making key elements of the technology available at no charge to qualified information technology service firms through-out North America who place orders through the service. The initial inventory of services available includes Junk Mail filtering, Emergency Mail for business continuity, email monitoring and hosting. The firm expects additional product announcements and partnerships in the near future. About MxToolBox MxToolbox (mxtoolbox.com) is headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company provides on-demand IT Business Management software and innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure and security services to the small and medium-sized business market throughout North America. The company also provides online email diagnostic tools that are used by tens of thousands of email administrators every day.

MxToolBox Announces the FlexBox Email Platform

Joel — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:22:00 GMT

FlexBox Email Platform

Exciting things are happening here at MxToolBox. Monday marked the official launch of the MxToolBox FlexBox Email Platform, a one-of-a-kind email services suite built on Patent Pending Technology and designed specifically for the small to medium business market. FlexBox is an integrated collection of email services from email perimter security for companies that manage an email server in to fully managed email and collaboration for companies that do not want to manage an email server. But that's just the begining...

So, what Makes FlexBox "one-of-a-kind"?

Great question. Let me begin by saying that we're just as skeptical as you are when people throw around words like one-of-a-kind, revoluionary, groundbreaking, etc. You really have to be. When we say that FlexBox is one-of-a-kind, we can prove it. Read about it on our website and test it to see for yourself.

FlexBox's Technology allows a single email address to exist in two places. Aside from being really cool, this capability is particularly unique and useful in two different scenarios: Email Continuity and Testing/Migrating to a Managed Email Service.

Email Continuity

FlexBox Emergency Mail is a email continuity (aka disaster recovery) mail box that runs in parallel with an existing mailbox on a self managed server. Emergency Mail is always on, always ready and always synchronized with the primary mailbox. It is the first email continuity service with Zero Switchover Time, Zero IT Intervention to Activate, Zero Switchback time, and a rolling 30 day history of received email. That means that if you have FlexBox Emergency and your server goes down, your users can immediately begin using the Emergency Email system without skipping a beat. They can send and receive email without any intteruption, which leaves you free to fix the problem. Once your server is back up, the Emergency Mail boxes automatically synchronizes with the mailbox on your server, meaning you don't have to migrate any data.

Emergency Mail gives small to medium businesses the same kind of protection from email outages (planned and unplanned) that large enterprises have...but at a fraction of the cost. It is available on a per user basis, so you don't have to overspend for users that don't need the protection.

Migrating to Hosted Email

Any IT Manager/Consultant/Administrator that has ever considered moving from a self-managed server to a Managed Email Service knows that the migration process is enough to stop the idea dead in its tracks. Consider this---with traditional hosted email (i.e. Non-FlexBox hosted email), in order to simply test a hosted email solution in a day-to-day production environment, every single user must be moved off of the mail server and onto the Managed Platform, all at once. Just to test it! There goes the weekend. After migration, the help desk phone begins to ring, and ring, and ring. "How do I use this new sytem?" "Why didn't all of my contacts move over?" The list goes on and on. Forget about having any fun for the next couple of weeks. Then, if the managed solution just doesn't deliver, every user has to be moved back to the old system (another weekend), data from each system has to be reconciled (good luck) and all those folks in the Executive Suite are going to be asking for answers. Not fun.

FlexBox completely changes the rules of email migration. Because FlexBox technology allows a single address to exist in two places, IT Managers (you), can now have a user's mailbox on your server and you can have that same user's mailbox on a FlexBox Managed Mail server. You can have one user, some of your users or all of your users on both systems.

This means you can try Managed Email without migrating every user. FlexBox Managed Mail is the only Managed Email service that let's administrators keep some users on their in-house server and put other users on a Managed Server. It is also the only Hosted Email solution with Self Paced Migration. No more 72 hour weekends. No more two week help desk flood. No more damaged reputation. Just the exact email system that you need.

The FlexBox Services

Junk Mail is a spam and virus filtering service for email servers. Junk Mail has inbound and outbound mail filtering with free spooling.

Emergency Mail is an always on, always up to date backup email box. The mailbox has a rolling 30-day email history and is always ready. There is zero switchover time, zero IT Intervention and zero switch back time. Emergency Mail is provisioned on a per user basis.

Managed Mail is a fully hosted email service with high-end security and enterprise grade redundancy. Managed Mail is provisioned on a per user basis.

Managed Mail Pro is a email and collaboration solution with shared synchronized contacts and calendars. Managed Mail Pro also offers shared wikis and many other web 2.0 productivity features. Managed Mail Pro is provisioned on a per user basis.

Mobile device Synchronization and Email Archiving are also available. All services are available immediately to organizations throughout North America. And, if you are an IT Consultant or Solutions Provider, we are happy to announce that we have a FlexBox Email Services Partner Program

Starloop Blacklist

Joel — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:59:00 GMT

We have disabled lookups to the STARLOOP Blacklist. Our lookup tool is not checking Starloop as of 9 AM CST 9/10/07.Starloop began listing all IP Addresses sometime late Sunday evening. These listings are false positives. The Starloop website is down and the blacklist is now timing out. If you experience bounce backs as a result of a recipient system using Starloop, your best course of action is to contact the recipient email team and inform them that Starloop is not a current, working RBL.

We will monitor the sitatution and post any updates here.

Malware Infected Pfizer Computers Sending Viagra Spam

Joel — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:45:00 GMT

One of the most ironic spam stories we have seen to date was reported yesterday at Wired. For at least six months, botnet infected computers at Pfizer have spewed out a steady stream of Viagra spam. The infection has taken it's toll on Pfizers internet reputation, as researchers are reporting that approximately 138 Pfizer IP Addresses have been blacklisted so far.

Storm Worm Continues to Rage

Joel — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:46:00 GMT

The Storm Worm is proving to be among the most resilient, persistent pieces of malware ever. If you don't remember, the Storm Worm first burst onto the IT Security scene in January 2007. The worm got it's name because the first wave of propogtion spam that flooded inboxes had subject lines referencing a large storm that was pounding Europe at the time. Since then, the Storm Worm has morphed again and again, bringing an estimated 1.7 Million PCs into its Botnet in the process. Bot Herders have generally pushed the worm via a combination of emails containing links to worm infected websites. This of course means that IT must filter the worm at the email level and the browser level. Herders have also used infected zip file and excell file attachments to push the worm. Campaigns have varied: Virginia Tech Massacre, Greeting Card Spam, Password Protected Zip Files are just a few examples.

Currently, the Storm Worm herders are using emails with subject lines suggesting that the recipient is in a You Tube video. Anyone unsuspecting enough to click the link is taken to a malicious web page where they are attacked (and most likely infected) by the worm. Herders have also infected hundreds, possibly thousands, of Blogger Blogs with the malware.

This Storm just keeps on raging. An organization needs three elements to fight it: Robust email filtering. Robust web filtering. Security Conscious Employees that are trained to spot scams and not click on links or open attachments in suspect emails (the hardest part).

PDF Spam on the Wane

Joel — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:44:00 GMT

The PDF Spam Spike appears to be over...at least for now. But the Storm Worm Continues to rage across multiple vectors.

Workers Use Email More Than Telephone

Joel — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:53:00 GMT

Email is the top choice for business communication. A Datamonitor poll found that 100% of workers in the US and Pacific Asia use Email to perform their jobs, while only 80% use fixed line Telephones (76% also use Mobile Phones). 66% of those surveyed use IM.

PDF Spam Escalates Spam War

Joel — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 04:03:00 GMT

The PDF Spam Spike marks an escalation in the spam war. Spam rates, which have seen triple digit annual growth rates over the past two years, spiked dramatically last week. Spammers are sending larger and larger batches of spam and using ever-evolving cloaking techniques to evade email security filters. The latest spike is a strong example of the latest layered threat.

A sustained flood of emails with PDF attachments and either no subject line, or a vague but widely applicable business term in the subject line, and no text in the email body was unleashed last week and continues to date. The difficulty with the PDF Spam is that it mimics a common business email practice, which is to send an email with no subject line or a vague subject line, no body text, and a PDF attachment.

When fighting any spam tactic, one must always choose the right balance between stoping bad email and not stopping good email. In other words, you can stop all of the spam and accept a high number of false positives (when legitimate message is caught in spam filter), or you can stop most of the spam with few or no false positives.

Security filters will adjust to the PDF spam (just as they did with Image Spam earlier this year) and will then be challenged again by something new. The name of the game is to stop the known stuff and withstand heavy barrages of the new stuff, without losing legitmate email in the process.

Attachment Spam / Pump and Dump Scam Combo Behind Spam Spike

Joel — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 05:11:00 GMT

Last week's spam spike, marked by the single biggest one day jump ever (445%), put a new twist on an ever-evolving combination of spam and scam campaigns. A massive flood of PDF Spam was used to propogate a Pump and Dump Stock Scheme. The scam-paign lifted the share price of Prime Time Limited, a small Florida Company, a whopping 57% (from $.07 to $.11) through last Wednesday. The stock tumbled below $.07 in trading Thursday but fluttered up and down on Friday and this past Monday.

Prime Time denies involvemet in the scam and is working to identify shareholders who held "Naked Short" positions in the company. A Naked Short is:

A short selling tactic where a seller sells stock they don't own and bet that the stock price will drop in the few days before the sold stock must be delivered so that the delivered stock cost substantially less that the sold stock.
An ironic way for spammer-scammers to monitize their spam

Mobile Entertainment Inc and CYTV were two other penny stocks touted in the campagins. CYTV is a regular feature on the pump and dump circuit.

As always, the most astonishing fact of the case is that several thousand people, at least, took the bait (but hey, we know that Pump and Dump works).

The campaign used a large botnet to unleash a flood of relatively new attachment spam that fooled some defenses and simply overwhelmed others. It is also the first Pump and Dump Campaign to provoke a sustained elevation in trading volume.

Cyber Crime Cost US Consumers $7 Billion in the Past Two Years

Joel — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:43:00 GMT

A Consumer Reports study found that US Consumers lost a total of $7 Billion during 2005 and 2006. Roughly $2 Billion is attributed to Phising Scam losses and the remaing $5 Billion was spent to replace virus and spyware infected computers.

Spam and Virus Rates Still At All Time High

Joel — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 14:52:00 GMT

Spam

Spammers and Hackers have been busier than ever this summer. June set the record for all time high in spam messages, and spam rates continue to hover at around 90% of all messages sent. The Spackers (Spammer/Hacker) continue to hone their techniques in this constant game of cat and mouse. The latest trend is a shift to attachment spam, where the payload is delivered via an attached file. Attachment spam now represents a very significant portion of all spam sent. The bad guys have turned to PDF, Excell and Zip File Atachments to deliver spam. This means that spam will continue to eat up bandwidth and will likely lead to an increase in false positives, as anti-spam vendors adjust filters to account for the shift in spamming techniques. The good news? Image spam is on the decline.

Viruses

July has seen the largest sustained virus attack in over two years, with a flood of storm worm like malware delivered by Botnet Machines via fake greeting cards and spam messages with links to malware carrying web site.

Botnets

And, speaking of Botnets, despite a crackdown effort by the FBI early in the summer, it looks like the overall number of Botnet Zombie computers continues to grow.

The Prognosis

If you've seen more spam getting through your filters this summer, it's probably not because the developers and technicians that build and maintain your anti-spam / anti-virus decided to hang out at the pool until Fall. It's likely because the overall volume of spam and viruses continues to push boundaries never before seen. Couple this with the myriad of new techniques and tactics and, well, the security community has to scramble to keep up.

As for MxToolBox, we've worked hard to make sure our FlexBox Email Security Service has provided the highest possible level of protection for our customers mailbox's though this summer spam season.

Emergency Email: Don’t Let an Email Outage Jeopardize Your Business

Joel — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:58:00 GMT

Email is Business Critical

Email is a critical business tool. In less than two decades, email has grown to equal the telephone as one of the essential tools for conducting business. Email is uniquely positioned at the heart of business critical communications AND business critical data.

Businesses rely on email to coordinate, collaborate, prospect, sell, manage, etc. In addition to sending and receiving email, many organizations also use their email system to manage and share calendars and contacts, adding another layer of criticality.

For the unprepared organization, an email outage carries harsh consequences, including:

Missed Deadlines
Angry Clients
Lost Opportunity
Wasted Investment
Reduced Revenue
Damaged Reputation

Depending on the industry (i.e. Legal, Financial), there might even be implications of malpractice or regulatory non-compliance.

50% of all businesses that lose access to mission critical data or applications, including email, to an accident, equipment failure, disaster or other cause and are unable to recover within 24 hours go out of business within 6 months[1].

Email is Fragile

Of all the critical tools businesses use, email is by far the most vulnerable.

The technology and infrastructure that power email today are still based on the original email system devised in the 1970's, where approximately fifty academics sent research papers back and forth to one another. Trust was an inherent part of the system. Because the community was so small and so tightly knit, the likelihood of abuse was close to zero. Fast forward a few decades to now, and we have billions of emails sent everyday. On top of that, unknown masses of super-sharp cyber criminals are always waiting just around the corner to steal money and data.

This doesn't mean that the whole system is on the verge of collapse, it just means that a secure, reliable business email system requires a large investment and a great deal of care and expertise to build, manage, maintain and backup.

Email Outages can occur at anytime and are caused by maddening number of factors--from a spilled cup of coffee to a natural disaster. When you manage your own e-mail server, you have to be prepared to deal with hardware failure, security breeches, missed updates/patches, fire, flood, tornados, hurricanes, theft, and more. If an email hosting company manages email for you, you have to know that they are prepared for the same.

When Your Email Goes Down...

If your email server or an ancillary piece of your email system fails and you don't have a backup system in place, two things immediately happen:

No one at your business can send or receive email
Any email that is inbound to your server is probably lost forever

Depending on how you are setup, you may also have problems accessing historical email, contacts and calendars. What happens next is easy enough to imagine.

Eliminate the Risk of an Email Outage

Today's business climate is such that if an email system fails, businesses need to be able to continue to conduct business without missing a beat. Anything less exposes the business to untold risk.

A business can easily avoid the harsh consequences of an Email Outage with a professional Emergency Mail service. Emergency Mail Services (a.k.a. "Email Continuity," "Disaster Recovery") come in many colors, shapes and sizes. Many of them are inadequate.

To be completely effective, an Emergency Mail Service must have the following four characteristics:

Includes an intuitive web based email client that users are already familiar with
Contains a history of recent Email for users to reference
Provides Immediate Switch Over to the backup system so that no email, deadline or opportunity is missed
Requires little to no IT Intervention so that IT support does not become overwhelmed

Without these four capabilities, an Emergency Mail system is really just going to be as effective as a "band-aid on a bullet hole."

Don't Chance It

You business is important to you. Email is important to your business. Emergency Mail helps to ensure that an unforeseen email outage doesn't spiral into a full blown company crisis.

About MxToolBox, Inc: Based in Austin, TX, MxToolBox, Inc. is a leading provider of on demand email services to small business throughout the USA and Canada. MxToolBox's Email Security, Emergency Email, Managed Email and Email Archiving services make email secure, reliable and effective for over 30,000 users. Visit http://www.mxtoolbox.com/ or call 866-MxToolBox (866-698-6652) for more details.

[1] Gartner Group

FlexBox Mail Software, Zimbra, Wins eWEEK Excellence Award for Enterprise Collaboration

Joel — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:07:00 GMT

Zimbra recently won the eWEEK Excellence Award for Enterprise Collaboration for it's next generation messaging and collaboration suite. MxToolBox is excited about this award because Zimbra is the collaboration component that helps to power our FlexBox Managed Email Service. We chose Zimbra as our collaboration software because it is an innovative groupware system that scales up without degraded performance, and it plays well with our dedication to innovation and superior performance. Of course, we have combined Zimbra with our best-in-class security solution, our "we cross the line" service philosophy, and several sprinkles of the secret sauce to provide a hassle free, reliable, secure, high performance managed email service like no other.

FlexBox Managed EMail is a full exchange replacement with shared/synchronized contacts, calendars, email and mobile devices.The system synchronizes with Outlook, so your users don't have to learn a whole new bag of tricks. It also has a few added features that exchange doesn't (wikis, for example)...oh, and the web client is like a dream (think of the best of Outlook, combined with the best of Gmail).

Speaking of FlexBox, stay tuned in the weeks and months ahead for some upcoming announcements that promise to be as exciting as they will be groundbreaking.

FLOWGO Goes Away

Joel — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:16:00 GMT

The FLOWGO RBL has gone offline. As a result all IP Addresses are now "listed." Anyone who is using FLOWGO as an anti-spam measure on their server should remove it. If you receive a bounce message saying your mail was rejected due to listing on FLOWGO, please contact the recipient email administrator and advise them that FLOWGO is now offline.

We have removed FLOWGO from our lookup tool as of 7:30 AM CST. However, after FLOWGO went offline sometime lastnight, our server monitoring tool sent out noticies to roughly 1000 of our monitoring customers. If you received one of these alerts, you can disregard it.

Spamhaus DDOS SYN Flood Attack

Joel — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:57:00 GMT

Spamhaus was the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDOS) SYN Flood attack during through the middle of the week. The site is back up and running now on a new IP.

Spam Spikes Pose New Challenge for In-House Email Security Management

Joel — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 15:04:00 GMT

Spammers and hackers are turning to a new technique to defeat anti-spam appliances and, in some cases, knock email servers offline. Spam Spikes is an attack method where a domain's email servers are flooded with thousands and thousands of messages for a prolonged period of time. The spike messages are typically image spam. The combination of image spam and high volume can quickly overwhelm concentrated security appliances. If that happens, an email server is defenseless and can easily be knocked offline by the contiuned barrage. This is the curious part, though, because it seems to defeat the purpose of the attack, which is to spread spam and malware. Once the mail server is offline, then the spam is no longer being delivered. Which leads one to conclude that Spam Spikes are double-edged weapons. On the one hand, they can be used to overwhelm anti-spam appliances and get spam messages into inboxex. On the other, they can be used as a tool of malicious attack to bring down a mail server.

From our perspective, Spam Spikes seem to be an odd tool for spammers to employ, as they send out a loud signal over a prolonged period of time. Conventional wisdom holds that spammers are very ruluctant to expose their botnets with loud attacks.

To protect against spam spikes (and for the best protection from email spam and virueses), adminstrators should consider trading their self-managed, concentrated, single-point of filtering, local network attached hardware for a distrubuted, off-network filtering service. There are many reasons why we feel that a distributed, off-network filtering service ios far superior. Reletive to this discussion, the managed service is far less likely to be overwhelmed by a spike, because there are multiple (in the case of our service, thousands) of filtering servers. With the concentrated, local hardware/software there is a single point of filtering and thus a bottleneck and and a single point of failure.

IRS Scam Spam Campaign

Joel — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:20:00 GMT

In a variation on a classic social engineering spam scampaign (scam campaign), Spammers/Hackers (we call them "spackers" around here) are circulating two scams with emails purporting to be from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

In one scam, the email claims to be from the IRS Business Complaint Arbitration Service. The message claims that someone has filed a complaint against the target's business and that the IRS can help arbitrate the matter. The email contains an attachment titled "comlaint," which is a trojan known as backdoor.robofo. The IRS does not provide dispute arbitration services and has no Busines Comlaint Arbitration Division.

In the other scam, the email claims to be from the IRS's Criminal Investigation Unit. The email says that the target is under investigation for filing a false return. Like the first scam, the email includes a trojan attachment titled "Complaint."

“Everyone should beware of these scam artists,” says Kevin M. Brown, Acting IRS Commissioner. “Always exercise caution when you receive unsolicited e-mails or e-mails from senders you don’t know.”

That's good advice. Users shoudl note that the IRS almost never sends email and certainly does not send unsolicited email or notices of action via email. Surely none of our readers are surprised to hear that there is an IRS spam scam circulating. This is one of the oldest tricks in the spamming book. The interesting question is why? People (targets) are more likely to take an action that the spacker wants them to if a) They believe that the email is from an authoritative source (for better or for worse, that explains the IRS), and b) their defenses are lowered due to fear or urgency (being on the IRS's naughty list does that), c) the timing is right. In the case of timing, IRS scam emails always ramp up before tax day and continue afterwards.

Yes, the email crap continues to flow through the net, but, look on the bright side, at least we all have a good excuse to delete any email that seems to come from the IRS without looking at it!

Hackers Steal $450,000 From Carson City, Ca...Almost

Joel — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:43:00 GMT

A keylogger program on the Carson City, California City Treasurer's laptop recorded city fincial account passwords and allowed hackers to transfer $450,000 in funds to bank accounts in North Carolina and Michigan. City officials quiclkly noticed the missing monies and were able to freeze all by $45,000 of the funds.

Spammers Use of Artificial Intellegence to Increase

Joel — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:36:00 GMT

A study by Forrester Research predicts that Spammers' use of Artificial Intellegence (AI) to automatically create endless variations of spam campaigns and delivery avenues to evade detection and stay ahead of many spam filters will increase in the coming months.

RTF Trojan Targets Executive Data

Joel — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:13:00 GMT

An email disguised as a message from the IRS is targeting corporate executive's information. The email contains a Rich Text File (RTF) titled complaint.rtf, which, if opened, downloads a trojan to the executive's computer. The trojan steals login passwords and sends them to a remote server.

Phishing URLs at All Time High

Joel — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:08:00 GMT

The Anti-Phising Working Group (APWG) reports that the number Phising URLs detected in April was 55,643, almost double the previous record total.

April also saw a departure from Phishing URLs targeted almost exclusively at stealing login information for Financial Institutions to a more broad focus, including Financial Institutions, Social Netowrking, VOIP, and Email.

So-Called Spam King Arrested - What Does that Mean for Spam?

Joel — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:56:00 GMT

Robert Alan Soloway was arrested in Seattle on Wednesday. Dubbed "The Spam King" by authorities, Soloway allegedly spammed tens of millions of messages. Most of these contained links to websites where his company, Newport Internet Marketing, sold products and services.

Soloway was once listed in SpamHuas's Top 10 list of spammers and is still in the groups list of 135 internationally known spammers. If convicted, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of 65 years with fines up to $250K.

Upon his arrest, writers at publications across the globe suggested that the level of spam would fall dramatically. However, in reality, Soloway was only responsible for a very small percentage of global spam. His place as an uber-spammer has long been filled by Eastern Europoean spam gangs. In fact, spam levels have not decreased at all in the two days following his arrest.

The most positive effect of his arrest is the message it sends to any spammers or would be spammers operating in the US. Now if we could just get the Russins and Ukranians to follow suit...

Messaging Services Firm MxToolBox, Inc Adds Seven Blacklists to Blacklist Lookup Tool

Joel — Mon, 21 May 2007 18:11:00 GMT

MxToolBox, Inc. announced today that it has added six blacklists, also known as blocklists, RBLs, or DNSBLs, to its popular email blacklist lookup tool. The MxToolBox blacklist lookup tool will now check IP Addresses for listing on the MSRBL-Images, MSRBL-Phishing, MSRBL-Spam, MSRBL-Viruses, MSRBL-Combined and SpamHaus PBL blacklists, in addition to the 130 plus blacklists the tool currently checks.

The company added the lists to the tool to improve the quality of results for users. “We constantly work to make sure we have the most valuable, up-to-date list of Blacklists available to our users,” Founding CEO Eric Rachal said. “If there is a list that might cause deliverability problems for legitimate email users, we want to make sure that it is included it in our tool.”

Blacklists are lists of IP Addresses that have sent spam or have exploitable characteristics. Blacklists are commonly employed by email administrators to block incoming spam. There are dozens of blacklists available for use and each has a unique criteria for including an IP Address. For example, some lists include IP Addresses serving machines that are infected with worms and viruses, and others list IP Addresses within dynamic ranges. While blacklists certainly help fight spam, they can also block legitimate emails from non-spamming IP Addresses, an event referred to as a false positive.

The MxToolBox Blacklist Lookup tool is a free service that allows email administrators and users for non-spamming organizations who are having email deliverability problems to identify any blacklists that list their IP Addresses and see the reasons for the listing. The company also provides free blacklist consultations to companies who are listed or want to proactively avoid being listed. For non-spamming companies with blacklisted IP Addresses that cannot solve the problem, MxToolBox offers unique paid services to permanently eliminate the problem.

Joel Harvey, Director of Marketing explains, “The blacklist tool is not about email blacklists as much as it is about email deliverability. That is what our tool and our services are designed to do—enable and ensure the delivery of legitimate, non-spam email. The first step is to find out that you have a problem, like a blacklisted IP. The next step is to find out why. You may have a virus, you may have some configuration issues, or you may have an IP Address in an un-trusted range. The final step is to take action so that your critical outbound email starts flowing again.”

About MxToolBox, Inc.

MxToolBox.com is a popular website among IT professionals across the globe. The website has free tools that help users uncover, diagnose and fix messaging related problems. The company’s suite of free tools include MX Records Lookup, Server Diagnostics, Blacklist Lookup, SPF Records Lookup, and Free Mail Server Monitoring.

MxToolBox, Inc. offers innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure to the small and medium business market throughout North America. The company provides leading edge “Flip the Switch" messaging services to small and medium sized businesses, including email spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, hosted email and groupware, email disaster recovery and email archiving.