Over the course of the past five weeks, spam campaigns have been aimed at the staff members of over 100 ESPs and gambling sites. These targets have received emails typically with content that mentions the staffer by name, and purports to be from a couple, presumably friends or co-workers. The phish message has been sent numerous times, over several different systems, including using the facility of some ESPs, using online greeting card sites, and by way of a botnet. Sources confirm the list of addresses is very small (less than 3,000 addresses) and aimed 100% at staff responsible for email operations.

Paul Farnell was fortunate enough to get early access to the new Facebook Messages. He spent some time looking at its support for HTML email and wanted to report back on his early findings. In short: it's looking quite promising.