Now that the world did not end after all (not in our timezone anyway!), I thought I’d share two piece of news with you. Let’s start with the bad one:

• You will still receive spam in 2013.
• On the bright side, you will be better equipped against them.

We are working on a massive overhaul of the URL Harvester engine in ORF, the component responsible for detecting, decoding, prioritizing and sorting URL payloads in spam, such as web links and email address domains. The domain names harvested from URLs are checked in URIBLs such as Spamhaus DBL or surlb.org to see if they are associated with spam.

Among others, the ORF URL Harvester is receiving Internationalized Domain Name support in ORF 5.1. IDN(A) is a set of standards which enables writing domain names in alphabets and scripts like Cyrillic, Japanese or Hebrew, so with the new IDN support, ORF will be able to discover and lookup links like http://русский.idn.icann.org. The significance of this new feature is explained by the statistics below, but it should also be noted that IDNs can be abused in phishing emails for IDN homograph attacks so this feature also adds an extra bit of security to your email systems.

Lab tests with the new URL harvester resulted in a number of interesting statistics.

• Total spam emails tested: 16232 (spam age between 48 and 2 hours)
• Emails with URL payload: 88.55%
• Emails with IDN URL payload: 4.37%
• Total IDNs discovered: 26 (all from the .рф ccTLD)
• Percentage of IDNs blacklisted in Spamhaus DBL: 84.62%

While the sample is too small to draw conclusions of scientific quality, the 4.37% figure and Spamhaus’ high
detection rate shows that IDN support in ORF 5.1 can be a significant contributor toward a better spam detection.

We have rolled out a few updates to vamsoft.com recently to improve the overall experience. A quick summary is available below:

• Website speed improvements: The average page load time was reduced by 40%, thanks to several optimizations, like combining a CSS files and JS files, using CDNs, GZIP’ing and caching content and moving small images to CSS. The optimized site works best in IE9+ and other modern web browsers.

• New Feature Requests RSS feed: The new feed publishes changes in a daily digest, significantly reducing the noise from votes and other minor events. See the Feature Requests page for the new RSS.

• Forum navigation bar: Navigating back to vamsoft.com from the Community Forums was quite frustrating, as no obvious links were pointing back to the site—now it’s a lot easier using the recently introduced navigation bar for the forum.

Missing something? Send your improvement ideas to us.

The compatibility test results for ORF 5 and the new Windows platforms are just in. We are happy to report that ORF 5.0 is fully compatible with Windows 8 (for ORF Management Tools) and it is also compatible with Windows Server 2012 (with IIS 6 SMTP).

However, Microsoft® Exchange 2013 introduced a few breaking changes, so ORF 5.0 will not install on this platform. We will address these changes in ORF 5.1, a release specifically dedicated to Exchange 2013 compatibility.

Planning ahead with your SMAs has just gotten easier. Thanks to our recent website update, adding the SMA renewal deadline to your calendar is just one click away.

Go to the Licenses page and under “License Summary” part choose “(add to your calendar)”.

Download the reminder in iCal format for Microsoft Outlook import, or add the reminder directly to your Google Calendar. Scanning the QR code with your smartphone will add the event to your phone calendar.