A tweet from @threatpost that warned: “Twitter spam may become more context-aware” pointed me over to this article that had some interesting bits, like:

“Twitter malware and spam uses a pretty straightforward attack vector. You get a twitter message from an account (usually with an attractive female avatar) telling you that you’ll get something awesome if you click on the helpfully provided link. Most people don’t click, because they realize that if a hot chick sends you a link on twitter claiming you’ll win a free iPad, it’s probably not legit.”

The author goes on to predict that twitter spam will get a lot more sophisticated and targeted, and it will get harder and harder for people to determine who to trust and who’s a bot (speaking of bots) and who’s not a bot:

“Twitter link spam will get a lot more context aware in 2012 and it’s going to be difficult to make an eyeball determination whether someone you don’t know has sent you a link because they follow you and they think you will be interested in a topic, or they are just trying to spam you”

As a matter of fact, we get a lot of tweets from scantily clad fembots that try to make us click malicious links, so we built an app to deal with that. It’s called Unfurlr, and you’re free to use it too, whenever the fembots come knocking –>  http://unfurlr.com  (bookmark it now, because they will come knocking)

And here’s a little more background info about Unfurlr.

To our customers, and to their subscribers:

On January 2nd (yesterday), we started to see multiple hardware failures at one of our data centers. As background, we’ve spread MailChimp across 3 data centers across the country so we don’t have all our “eggs in one basket”. Then, we further divide each data center into different groups or “shards” of users. Some shards house big, high-volume users with large lists and intense server resource requirements, while some shards are for users with relatively smaller lists (less than 25k recipients is considered “small”). This is an attempt to keep issues for one set of users from bringing down our entire base of 1.2 million users.

US1, which is our first and oldest data center with the most users, saw 3 of the “small user” database shards failing. Around 2pm, we decided to completely disable access to those 3 database shards in order to prevent those users from logging in and creating new campaigns, which would’ve been lost in the event we had to restore from backup. This affected about 400,000 users.

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I love Amazon Web Services and I’m always in awe of their frequent upgrades. Lots of exciting innovation there, it seems. But man, someone there needs to invest in a thesaurus (which are actually really cheap on Amazon). Has anyone else noticed they’re always so excited there? Here are some screenshots of the intros for almost all their emails I’ve received this year:

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Hi folks, sorry if this is terse, but wanted to post something to our blog asap:

We’re in the midst of upgrading our servers. The goal is to help make things nice and fast and stable for all the holiday traffic we’re expecting for our senders.

Unfortunately, it looks like there may be certain scenarios where relatively complex segmentation queries caused us to send out duplicate emails. This is obviously something that’s potentially extremely embarrassing for us, but more embarrassing for our customers, so we wanted to get this apology posted for you to link to in case this affected your campaign. As of right now, we’ve only seen one report of this happening (but in a big way, unfortunately), so we’re scanning the system to see if there are more cases of this. If you don’t send campaigns that use relatively complex segmentation queries for different interest groups, there’s nothing to worry about. If this affected your list, please let our support know. They have authority to make this right for you. If you’re a subscriber who received duplicate emails, we’re extremely sorry about that.

I get these automatic alerts whenever Zappos gets new ugly shoes (I’ve blogged about my fondness for ugly shoes before). Anyway, I just noticed they changed their email alerts format from plain text to HTML.

Read the bullet points. Particularly, #2 and #5:

When you’re writing your emails (especially automated inventory alerts like this one) you can get away with boring, functional, corporate writing and nobody will mind. But can you get away with sneaking in a little fun? That’s a lot more challenging imho.