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Why it is so hard, to find a safe password

Passwords should be safe – we all know that. But how can we achieve it? My opinion is: Today, there is no way to find a satisfying solution. I will explain why and try to find solutions from user perspective.

How people handle passwords

Which passwords do you use in the internet? Would you consider them to be safe? While talking with people, I get the impression there is mainly three categories, how people deal with that problem:

easy passwords - not a good idea

  1. People, who do not care at all. main goal is to remind the passwords. Often used are passwords like “qwerty”, “123456”, “password” or the name of the pet (or wife/husband). The password is the same on each login page on the internet.
  2. People, who make a science out of it. They use different passwords for each login and choose passwords with maximum security (mixture of letters, capitals, numbers, special characters). Those can only be stored in Password safes, because nobody can remember them anymore. (A password safe is an encrypted piece of software keeping lots of passwords with information of username, URL, etc. Usually you just need to remember one single password to unlock it.)
  3. People using mainly one password, which is hard to guess (like sentences with some replaced characters (e.g. “n0b0Dyc4Nr3aDTh!s”).
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Blog

Security & Encryption for Mass Messaging

Since the Heartbleed and Snowden case there has been a lot of discussion regarding data encryption and security – specifically in regards to email. Many questions such as ‘what options are there to protect data?’, ‘how safe are these options’ and ‘what factors should I watch out for?’ are continuously brought up. We help to clear up these topics below.

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Beginners Guide

Lesson 4, Authentication and Prevention

[Beginners guide to Deliverability] Lesson 4, Authentication and prevention

Lesson 4, Authentication and prevention

As discussed in Lesson 1, the history of email, Deliverability is forever developing, not only to suit how people are intereacting with email but also to try and prevent some of the attacks that threaten ESPs, ISPs and their consumers.

One of the burning questions with email is, how do we know this email is from who it says its from, how do we know if this is a legitimate email?

Luckily for us, there are ways in which we can obtain this information and this is vital for us to have confidence in the knowledge that our emails are authenticated.

There are several types of authentication, to name the most commonly known ones they are:

SPF
DKIM
Sender ID
DMARC

Below i shall briefly describe how they work to authenticate emails and prevent the attacks mentioned in Lesson 3.

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Beginners Guide

Lesson 3, Security threats and Cyber attacks

Lesson 3, Security threats and Cyber attacks

Most of the time when talking about email, email marketing, deliverability or i’m explaining my work to my family, the first thing that is mentioned is the word ‘Spam’.
Spam

Why is this and how does the phrase come about?

You’d think that Spam is a fake meat per se, this would be a great term to coin for those annoying acquisition based emails you receive, well it’s not directly because of this. The actual term dates back to 1970, whereby there is a famous sketch by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In this sketch, based in a restaurant; some customers float in, and then you have vikings singing in the corner, the waitress comes over and then it all descends into mayhem, everything on the menu is with spam, and everyone in the room is singing ‘Spam’ drowning out the the other conversations.

You can watch the scene here.

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Beginners Guide

Lesson 2, the beginning of Commercial email

Lesson 2, the beginning of Commercial email

Now we start to discover the initial beginnings of commercial email. Please note that there are many ISPs not mentioned here, however i shall endeavor to cover them in my blog postings along the line, the major players are mentioned as key points of reference. I found a really cool infographic regarding the history of commercial email.

In 1988 Steve Dorner developed Eudora the first commercial product to be widely used for reading and sending email on local area networks (LANs)

A year later in 1989 Compuserve and MCI mail become first formally sanctioned email carriers connected to the internet (1989)

1991, Ray Ozzie and Mitch Kapor released a major version of Lotus Notes (2.0)

1992, Microsoft releases Microsoft Outlook their answer to Lotus Notes.

In 1993, AOL brought out an ISP, which was accessible internet based email system by this time there were 7 million users.