More CASL enforcement

Last week the CRTC published a CASL enforcement action wherein they fined an individual $15,000 for 10 violations of the act.

The Commission imposes an administrative monetary penalty of $15,000 on William Rapanos for 10 violations of section 6 of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation. Specifically, Mr. Rapanos sent commercial electronic messages (i) that did not identify the sender, (ii) that did not include information that enables the recipient to readily contact the sender, (iii) without prior consent from the recipients, and (iv) that, in certain cases, did not include a functioning unsubscribe mechanism.

I do encourage folks who are concerned about CASL to read through the full article on the CRTC website. They write out how hard they tried to work with the individual in question. They really seem to have tried to do what they could to get compliance with the act without assessing a fine. As the CRTC says, the aim of penalties is to promote compliance, not to publish people who violate the act. We’ve certainly seen other CASL cases involving much more mail, that proportionally smaller penalties assessed.
One thing that I noticed in the article was the description of the individual under investigation. The CRTC walks through the discussions with him and the investigations into sending. The documented behavior is very “spammer” to me, especially the “someone is doing this to frame me” and “someone must have stolen my identity.” No one really believes that someone would steal your identity, break into your house, use your wifi and … only send spam. There’s so much more that can be done with that level of access.
None of his behavior is any surprise to any of us who have worked with spammers.

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Things you need to read: 2/5/16

gearheadAsk the Expert: How Can Email Marketers Stay Out of Gmail Jail and in the Inbox? The expert in question is an old friend of mine, Andrew Barrett. I met Andrew online in the late 90s, and we worked together (briefly) at MAPS. He was out of email for a while, but I’m pleased he came back to share his talents with us. The information in the article is valuable for anyone who struggles with getting to the Gmail inbox.
Unclutter Your Inbox, Archive & Keep Your Messages. Shiv Shankar talks about some new features at Yahoo Mail. With a simple click, you can archive email so it’s available to search, but not cluttering up your inbox. One of the things that jumped out at me from that article is that Yahoo is providing 1 TB of storage. That’s more than Google!
The EEC is doing a survey on the impact of CASL and want to hear from marketers. Go check out their blog post and take their survey.
Sparkpost has a guest blog from Alex Garcia-Tobar, co-founder of Valimail about common DKIM failures. I’ve met Alex a few times and I’ve always found him a pleasure to talk to. Alex is somewhat new in the email space, but he really gets some of the challenges in the authentication space. A lot of the issues he mentions in that blog post like lack of key rotation and shared keys are some of the technical debt I was talking about in my predictions for 2016 post.
What links have you read this week that are worth sharing?

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Are botnets really the spam problem?

Over the last few years I’ve been hearing some people claim that botnets are the real spam problem and that if you can find a sender then they’re not a problem. Much of this is said in the context of hating on Canada for passing a law that requires senders actually get permission before sending email.
Botnets are a problem online. They’re a problem in a lot of ways. They can be used for denial of service attacks. They can be used to mine bitcoins. They can be used to host viruses. They can be used to send spam. They are a problem and a lot of people spend a lot of time and money trying to take down botnets.
For the typical end user, though, botnets are a minor contributor to spam in the inbox. Major ISPs, throughout the world, have worked together to address botnets and minimize the spam traffic from them. Those actions have been effective and many users never see botnet spam in their inbox, either because it’s blocked during send or blocked during receipt.
Most of the spam end users have to deal with is coming from people who nominally follow CAN SPAM. They have a real address at the bottom of the email. They’re using real ISPs or ESPs. They have unsubscribe links. Probably some of the mail is going to opt-in recipients. This mail is tricky, and expensive, to block, so a lot more of it gets through.
Much of this mail is sent by companies using real ISP connections. Brian Krebs, who I’ve mentioned before, wrote an article about one hosting company who previously supported a number of legal spammers. This hosting company was making $150,000 a month by letting customers send CAN SPAM legal mail. But the mail was unwanted enough that AOL blocked all of the network IP space – not just the spammer space, but all the IP space.
It’s an easy decision to block botnet sources. The amount of real mail coming from botnet space is zero. It’s a much bigger and more difficult decision to block legitimate sources of emails because there’s so much garbage coming from nearby IPs. What AOL did is a last resort when it’s clear the ISP isn’t going to stop spam coming out from their space.
Botnets are a problem. But quasi legitimate spammers are a bigger problem for filter admins and end users. Quasi legitimate spammers tend to hide behind ISPs and innocent customers. Some send off shared pools at ESPs and hide their traffic in the midst of wanted mail. They’re a bigger problem because the mail is harder to filter. They are bigger problems because a small portion of their recipients actually do want their mail. They’re bigger problems because some ISPs take their money and look the other way.
Botnets are easy to block, which makes them a solved problem. Spam from fixed IPs is harder to deal with and a bigger problem for endusers and filters.

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Spammers, eh?

SpamBoxI’m back from a fun and successful trip to the APSIS Email Marketing Evolved conference. Of course, this means I’m digging out my mailboxes and going through mail I’ve ignored for the past week. It’s amazing how the spam builds up when I’m not tending to it every day.

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