Comments and forums seem like an odd place for spam especially when they don’t permit HTML. What could a spammer gain? The only thing I can think of is possibly a link to their profile. Yet, last week a company I know was hit by a massive spam attack on its forums. Based on volume and frequency and the inclusion of HTML (even though it clearly didn’t render) it appears that the attack was fully automated, including the creation of user profiles. User profile creation required an email account...

It has been great for startups to be able to fire up instances on Amazon EC2 or Slicehost for next to nothing, but one thing that has gone down the drain in doing so is email deliverability. I try out a lot of new services all the time and at this point I would say that well over half of those new services don’t get their email messages into my inbox. Instead they get swallowed up by Postini. And because Postini is generally excellent (very few false positives), I rarely bother to check it. T...

Comments and forums seem like an odd place for spam especially when they don’t permit HTML. What could a spammer gain? The only thing I can think of is possibly a link to their profile. Yet, last week a company I know was hit by a massive spam attack on its forums. Based on volume and frequency and the inclusion of HTML (even though it clearly didn’t render) it appears that the attack was fully automated, including the creation of user profiles. User profile creation required an email account...

It has been great for startups to be able to fire up instances on Amazon EC2 or Slicehost for next to nothing, but one thing that has gone down the drain in doing so is email deliverability. I try out a lot of new services all the time and at this point I would say that well over half of those new services don’t get their email messages into my inbox. Instead they get swallowed up by Postini. And because Postini is generally excellent (very few false positives), I rarely bother to check it. T...