Virtual Business Cards and Calendars

A vCard and vCalendar could be very useful attachments to add in your email especially if you have a lot of customers who use mail clients like Microsoft Outlook which support them.

1)Attaching a vCard in your emails would make it easier for your email recepient to add your complete information to their Address Book. A vCard could hold your name, address information, phone numbers,URL's, logos, photographs, and even audio clips.

2)A vCalendar/iCalendar could be attached to your email to send out meeting requests, event announcement and tasks which would get added to your customer's calendar.

I'm sure most of you might already be attaching it on your outbound emails too, but do you scan your inbox for vCards? Could it be parsed to update the profile of your contact? There could be customers who have configured their mail clients to attach their vCard in all outbound emails.

Tar-pitting

"Tarpitting" also known as 'Teergrubing' is a way of reducing spam or spam-related attacks (such as directory harvesting). It involves delaying SMTP communications with remote servers suspected of sending unsolicited e-mail. This slows down the the automated email sender threads of spammers as they are forced to spend more time to send out the email and in some cases give up all together as their session timesout.

There are a lot of variants of this, some servers might tarpit based on sender reputation, while others look out for number of concurrent connections made, number of recepients addressed in the RCPT TO field of the same connection etc.

Metrics which show the average smtp session time and number of time smtp session timeouts per email domain might be a good way to find out if you are being tarpitted by a particular domain.