Alphabetical spammers

There have been a couple posts recently about a paper presented at the Fifth Conference on Email and Spam (CEAS). The paper showed how addresses beginning with different letters get different volumes of spam.
But this post is not really about the paper, although it is an interesting academic review of spam, it is more about a memory that the discussions triggered.
Long ago I was handling the abuse desk at the very large network provider. This was in the days before Feedback loops, so every complaint was an actual forwarded email from a recipient. Generally, we saw a couple dozen complaints about any individual spam problem. Not a huge volume by any means, but that meant that any volume of complaints was significant.
One afternoon I started seeing a spike in complaints about a customer who never received complaints before. I started looking a little deeper and discovered we had around 50 complaints about this mailing, many from people I knew, and all from individuals at domains that started with A. This was one of the few times we actually pulled the plug in the middle of a mailing.
I still remember going to my boss suggesting this was something to take action on now because we had over 50 complaints and they were still in the A‘s! The customer was mortified that the guaranteed opt-in list they purchased was so bad and promised never to spam again.
Have a good weekend everyone.

Related Posts

Verifying email addresses

Over at CircleID Aviram Jenik posts about using email addresses as identification and how that can go horribly wrong if the website does no verification. In his case, the problem is a user who has made a purchase using Aviram’s gmail address and Aviram now has access to the other users personal information. As he explains it:

Read More

Forgery and spamware

Recently there has been a massive uptick in forgeries. I have been seeing hundreds of bounce back messages, peaking at more than 1000 in an hour. I have been talking about this with people who monitor large spamtrap feeds, large MTAs and spamfilters and it seems this is not an isolated experience. The consensus seems to be that there is new spamware out there which is using email addresses on the spam list as a From: address
The volume itself is annoying. Thousands of messages a day from “mailer-daemon” telling me that the mail I sent with the subject line “Get a longer tool” cannot be delivered to some random address some where. These are coming to at least 3 separate email addresses. One of them was given to Intuit back in 2001/2002 when I registered a copy of Quicken, and ended up leaked to loan spammers and is all over spam lists. The other two are addresses scraped from websites. Same spammer has them, same spammer is using them as part of his spam run.
Even more annoying than the volume, though, is the challenge/response emails. “Your email to jobobjimbo@example.com cannot be delivered until you click this link.” I have been adding every domain I can find that is using c/r to my filters, and just discarding the c/r emails so I do not have to deal with them. That is not my ideal solution, it does mean that if someone using c/r ever tries to contact me I will not see the challenge and our communications cannot happen.
Some people have recommended that the right way to deal with challenges from forged spam are actually to answer the challenges. As the reasoning goes, if someone using c/r is going to outsource their spam filtering to a victim of spam forgery, then they should expect that the “spam filter” may have a different opinion than they do. While I always sympathized with this viewpoint, I was not sure I would ever confirm spam forgeries. The sheer volume of c/r stuff I have received in the last few weeks has almost convinced me that people who use c/r deserve every bit of spam they get. If a c/r filter lets in spam, then perhaps they will reconsider their choice to spew challenges out to forged email addresses.
The amount of c/r spam I am getting as part of the forgery runs is decreasing, I think I have finally managed to block the primary sources. It does mean I will not be able to communicate with people who use c/r in the future, but I find this a small price to pay for not having to be an outsourced spam filter. I get enough of my own spam, I really do not want to have to deal with yours.

Read More

Social network sends spam

Yesterday we talked about social networks that harvest the address books of registered  users and send mail to all those addresses on behalf of their registered user. In the specific case, the registered user did not know that the network was going to send that mail and subsequently apologized to everyone.
That is not the only way social networks collect addresses. After I posted that, Steve mentioned to me that he had been receiving invitations from a different social network. In that case, the sender was unknown to Steve. It was random mail from a random person claiming that they knew each other and should network on this new website site.  After some investigation, Steve discovered that the person making the invitation was the founder of the website in question and there was no previous connection between them.
The founder of the social networking site was harvesting email addresses and sending out spam inviting people he did not know to join his site.
Social networking is making huge use of email. Many of my new clients are social networking sites having problems delivering mail. Like with most things, there are some good guys who really do respect their users and their privacy and personal information. There are also bad guys who will do anything they can to grow a site, including appropriating their users information and the information of all their users correspondents.
It is relatively early in the social networking product cycle. It remains to be seen how much of an impact the spammers and sloppier end will have. If too much spam gets through, the spam filters and ISPs will adapt and social networks will have to focus more on respecting users and potential users in order for their mail to get delivered.

Read More