McCain Campaign Spamming

As I mentioned in my post on spam from the Obama campaign, there have been reports of spam coming from the McCain campaign. However, the McCain campaign does not seem to be sending the volume of mail that the Obama campaign is, and so they are not as visible.
A recent post over at Denialism Blog shows that the McCain campaign has some of the same problems as the Obama campaign. Chris talks about the unsubscribe options he is presented when trying to stop the spam he is receiving. He suggests the campaign adds another option:

I never signed up for your stupid email list. I never supported you, except when you passed McCain-Feingold, and I’d vote for Tina Fey before Sarah Palin. Please take me off your list.

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SpamZa: corrupting opt-in lists, one list at a time

A number of ESPs have been tracking problematic signups over the last few days. These signups appear to be coming from an abusive service called SpamZa.
SpamZa allows anyone to sign up any address on their website, or they did before they were unceremoniously shut down by their webhost earlier this week, and then submits that address to hundreds of opt-in lists. This is a website designed to harass innocent recipients using open mailing lists as the harassment vehicle.
Geektech tested the signup and received almost a hundred emails 10 minutes after signing up.
SpamZa was hosted on GoDaddy, but were shut down early this week. SpamZa appears to be looking for new webhosting, based on the information they have posted on their website. 
What does this mean for senders?
It means that senders are at greater risk for bad signups than ever before. If you are targeted by SpamZa, you will have addresses on your list that do not want your mail. Some of those addresses could be turned into spam traps.

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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.

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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:

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