Don't spam filter your role accounts

A variety of “amazon.com order confirmations” showed up in my inbox this morning. They were quite well done, looking pretty close to real Amazon branding, so quite a few people will click on them. And they funnel people who do click to websites that contain hostile flash apps that’ll compromise their machines (and steal their private data, login and banking credentials then add them to botnets to attack other sites and so on).
Not good. Just the sort of urgent, high-risk issue that ISP abuse desks really want to hear about. I sent email about it to the ISPs involved, including a copy of the original email. One of them went to iWeb, a big (tens of thousands of servers) hosting company.
This was the response:

<abuse@noc.privatedns.com>: host mott.privatedns.com[174.142.252.34] said: 554 rejected due to spam content (in reply to end of DATA command)

That’s iWeb’s main abuse address for their address space, as registered with ARIN. They even have a comment in their network registration that says “Please use abuse@noc.privatedns.com for abuse issues”.
For email related abuse (spam, malware email, botnets, phishing, viruses, …) almost all valid, actionable abuse reports will include a copy of the email involved. And that’s exactly the sort of content that content-based spam filters do their best to block. That means that putting content-based spam filters on your abuse or security role addresses will prevent you seeing most reports about abusive traffic coming from your network.
There are some companies that have an intentional policy of rejecting most spam reports sent to them so that their abuse metrics look better, and they don’t have to pay for abuse desk staff to handle the high volumes of abuse reports their customers provoke. “Mistakenly” putting spam filters on their abuse alias is one way of doing that – others include using non-standard abuse aliases, demanding reports come in only via web forms, requiring abuse reports be sent in non-human-writable formats while discarding all others, and many more. If you don’t want to behave responsibly it’s easy enough to dodge those reports.
Legitimate companies really want to know about abusive traffic sooner rather than later, so they can shut it down and mitigate the damage as quickly as possible. Email systems are complex, though, and it’s quite easy for an upgrade to spam filtering at a companies main mailserver to mistakenly by applied to abuse@ and security@ aliases – especially when spam filtering or email services are outsourced. And if you’re a company that uses dozens of domains it’s easy to lose track of where mail to abuse@ some of those domains ends up.
If you’re responsible for email, abuse or security at your organization it’s worth occasionally checking that your role accounts actually work. Find yourself a fairly obvious bit of spam, then forward it to your abuse@ role address (with a sentence or two telling your abuse desk that you’re just testing, and can they reply to your mail so you know they received it).
Real spam sent directly to abuse@ role addresses can be a severe problem, but content-based filtering is not the way to deal with it. One approach that we suggest to our Abacus users is to prioritize reports that mention a URL or an IP address on your network, so that legitimate, actionable reports will “bubble up” above any spam.

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Have you audited your program lately?

A few months ago, I got spammed by a major brand. I know their ESP takes abuse seriously, so I sent a note into their abuse desk. It bounced with a 550 user unknown. I sent another note into a different abuse address, it bounced. I sent mail into their corporate HQ, it disappeared into a black hole. I eventually connected with their delivery person and he’d not seen hide nor hair of any complaint. Their entire abuse handling system had broken down and no one noticed.
In the recent past, I was dealing with a client’s SBL listing. We were talking about how their fairly clean subscription process ended up with multiple Spamhaus spamtraps on the list. They mentioned bounce handling, and that they’d not been correctly managing bounces for some period of time. Their bounce handling system was broken and no one noticed.
Last year, I was working with another client. They were looking at why some subscribers were complaining about unsubscribes not taking. A bit of poking at different forms and they realized that one of their old templates pointed to an old website. Their unsubscription form had broken and no one noticed.
Another client insisted that their engagement handling removed any addresses that didn’t open or click on mail. But after ignoring their mail for 6 months, they still hadn’t stopped mailing me. Their engagement handling was broken and no one noticed.
Periodic monitoring would have caught all of these things before they became a big enough problem to result in a Spamhaus listing, or recipient complaints, or lawsuits for failure to honor CAN SPAM. Unfortunately, many companies don’t check to make sure their internal processes are working very often.
Email marketing is not set and forget. You need to monitor what is happening. You need to make sure that your processes are still in place and things are still working.

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Amendment is futile, part 2

When Yahoo filed for dismissal of the Holomaxx complaint, they ended the motion with “Amendment would be futile in this case.” The judge granted Yahoo’s motion but did grant Holomaxx leave to amend. Holomaxx filed an amended complaint earlier this month.
The judge referenced a couple specific deficiencies of Holomaxx’s claims in his dismissal.

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Email without filters

… or Find the False Positive.
Anyone sending a lot of email has complained about spam filters and false positives at some point. But most people haven’t run a mailbox with no spam filters in front of it in recent years, so don’t have much of a feel for what an unfiltered mailbox looks like, how important filters are and how difficult their job is.
I run no transaction level filters in front of my mailbox, just content filters that route mail to one of several inboxes or a junk folder, so if I want to I can look at what unfiltered email looks like. I took data from all mail that was sent to me yesterday, and put it in a format that really shows the problem filters face and especially the difficulty of spotting which mail in the junk folder is a false positive.
An inbox with no filters looks like this.

Running a spam filter against it, simply categorizing each email as spam (pink) or not-spam (green) looks like this.
 

Even with the messages categorized as spam vs not-spam it’s hard to work out which messages are important and which aren’t, let alone where the false positives might be.
If I sort the categories by hand you get this – where you can see that out of 1200 or so mails about three quarters were spam. Of the three false positives two were bulk email that I didn’t care that I didn’t receive and only one was email that I considered important.
 
 

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