81–90 of 107 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's uncharitable of you to assume she can't tell the difference between a botnet and a spike in traffic. I don't think so. It's incredibly difficult to tell the difference, given that a DDOS is a huge spike in traffic.
Real users load CSS and images, run javascript, stay on the page more than a second, etc.
I'm sad to see that HN is being used as a platform for this sort of demagogy, and sad that stories about this tawdry little tale are indiscriminately voted up above other stories which are far more interesting. DDOS of a mailing service that lots of websites rely on because a completely unrelated company decided to fire someone is not an occasion for lol and schadenfreude as some posters here would have it. As a meth…
As much as I don't support the methods, seems like this actually sends a message (right or wrong). So it perfectly works from attacker's perspective.
I'm pretty sure by now every critical person in Sendgrid know the details of what happened, why happened and people involved. Not because of the initial twitter discussions but because this actually costs them money directly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by "to warm up an IP"?
If an IP address does not have a history of sending [large amounts of] email it is considered "cold". If that IP address then suddenly begins sending huge numbers of emails, many providers will assume the worst (that the email is being used for SPAM) and either block the IP or mark messages coming from it as SPAM. "Warming up" the IP means sending a smaller number of emails (per time period) and slowly increasing the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If an IP address does not have a history of sending [large amounts of] email it is considered "cold". If that IP address then suddenly begins sending huge numbers of emails, many providers will assume the worst (that the email is being used for SPAM) and either block the IP or mark messages coming from it as SPAM. "Warming up" the IP means sending a smaller number of emails (per time period) and slowly increasing the…
That's when you physically call your sales rep and explain why your using their services and ask them to whitelist you. I say this from experience. If you called my employer (and any of our competitors, I'm certain) and said "I need to host a mail relay that's ready to go from no traffic to tens of thousands of emails per second, here's my company website, and here's our credit card", we'd be happy to make it work fo…
If Google (or any other ISP) suddenly sees an big spike in email from @example.com on an IP that @example.com hasn't used previously, Google is much more likely to mark those emails as Spam.
So senders need to 'warm up' an IP by sending a small amount of email first, usually for a few days at least.
So if you're a SendGrid customer expecting to send 2,000,000 emails today, you can't just switch to a new ESP and send those same emails. Spam rates will go through the roof.
First we replaced SMTP that was distributed and designed to be resilient to outages (i.e. not lose messages) with proprietary HTTP APIs and now we complain that they don't notify us via email when they are down. Nice. I am guilty of using SES myself, but it's sad to see email becoming increasingly centralized.
As services go, its lock-in seems very minimal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll just start following them on Twitter then. I've recently started working somewhere new where we use SendGrid, and this is the first outage I've been aware of.
I did the same thing. Followed them on twitter just to be aware of the outage status without having to go look for it.
OK, I'll bite - is this a coincidence - or are they being DDOS'd over the PyCon incident?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by "to warm up an IP"?
If an IP address does not have a history of sending [large amounts of] email it is considered "cold". If that IP address then suddenly begins sending huge numbers of emails, many providers will assume the worst (that the email is being used for SPAM) and either block the IP or mark messages coming from it as SPAM. "Warming up" the IP means sending a smaller number of emails (per time period) and slowly increasing the…
Even though I'm a SG customer, I can't help but feel a little schadenfreude. edit: when I made this comment I thought this was a random service failure that would last couple of minutes. More than 1 hour later, I don't think it's that funny anymore as I'm being affected as well.