Recent Posts

Important notification spammers break the law

I’m currently being inundated at multiple address with spam advertising spamming services. Most of these notices have the subject line: IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION. The text includes:

Resource hogging

Today on SFGate there was an article talking about how some Bay Area coffee houses were struggling to deal with workers who purchase one cup of coffee and then camp out all day using the free wifi. The final paragraph quoted one of the campers.

Lessons from the good, the typical and the ugly

What can smart ESPs learn from my recent series The good, The typical and The ugly?

Delivery case study

Mailchimp published a case study looking at a customer moving from sending in house to using Mailchimp.

And the ugly…

Getting back to my series on the good, the typical and the ugly in the ESP field, and there is some very ugly out there. I have 3 examples of the ugliness out there and what ESPs and legitimate senders are competing with.
The fake ESP
A spammer approached me early on in my consulting career, asking me to help him set up a fake ESP. He wanted to set up his corporate network so that to an outsider it would look like he was selling ESP services and thus had a large number of customers. There wouldn’t be any customers, however, all the mail would be coming from his company. When the blocking got bad enough, and it would as he would purchase addresses from anywhere, he would “disconnect” the responsible customer. My role was to help him come up with a plausible sounding acceptable use policy and then contact the ISPs when he “disconnected” the customer. I declined to participate in this scheme. This doesn’t appear to have stopped him, though, if the rumors I hear are to be believed.
Waterfalling
Related to the fake ESP scheme is waterfalling. Spammers acquire lists of email addresses and then begin the process of cleaning them by mailing. In some cases, they mail through fake ESPs, as above. In other cases, they actually spread their traffic out across legitimate ISPs. As they mail the lists through the ESPs, they remove unsubscribes, bounces and complaints. When the list reaches a set cleanliness, they move it to another ESP. They repeat this, gradually moving through cleaner and cleaner ESPs. Eventually, they move the list to their own network and sell mailings to it as an opt-in list. It’s not opt-in, it’s just cleansed of all negative responders.
The companies abusing ESPs to clean their lists do tarnish the reputation of ESPs. While the responsible ESPs do disconnect the waterfallers, they usually do so after problems are detected. That being said, there are some companies that are constantly looking for “partnerships” at ESPs and the ESPs turn them away during the sales cycles.
Affiliates
While not necessarily an ESP problem there are some large companies out there that hire spammers to send acquisition email for them. They also send their own mail, both marketing and transactional, through ESPs. The issue for ESPs come when the URL blocks happen and the bad reputation of their customer’s mail bleeds back to the ESPs IP addresses. The ESP becomes known as “one of those places that mails for X” and their reputation falls accordingly. In some cases, even if the mail through the ESP is clean and opt-in, the ESP finds itself blocklisted for just doing business with a company that hires spammers.
I’ve had a couple clients recommended to me by ESPs because the ESP was dealing with a persistent spam block around this particular customer. The mail the customer sent through the ESP was opt-in, but the client was using an extensive network of affiliates to send spam for them. I collected a lot of examples of their spam from various affiliates, even gave them a couple of examples from my own email addresses. One of those addresses has not been actively used in 6 years. My client tells me they talked to their affiliates and that the affiliate assured them I had signed up, I just forgot. The client chose to believe the affiliate over me, despite the fact that I had many other examples. That client lost their ESP (and good for the ESP) but is still sending spam. I just got one advertising their stuff yesterday, at the same address I gave to them years ago, all images, hashbusters, domain hidden behind proxy, coming from a snowshoer network.
All of the companies I’ve talked about here describe themselves as legitimate email marketers. Even the company telling me I opted in to their mail was defending themselves and their affiliates as legitimate email marketers.

Email related predictions for 2010

As my recent series of posts has indicated, I am seeing a lot of future changes in the email industry.

SpamAssassin Problems

The default SpamAssassin configuration considers any date far in the future to be extremely suspicious, which is pretty reasonable.
However, as @schampeo points out, it also seems to consider any date later than 2009 to be “far in the future”.
That means that until the SpamAssassin folks roll out a fix, and that gets deployed by SpamAssassin users pretty much all email will get an additional 2-3.5 spamminess points. That’s likely to cause a lot of content-based blocking over the next few weeks, until fixed rules are deployed both by SpamAssassin users and by all the various spam filtering appliances that use SpamAssassin rulesets.
(If you’re a SpamAssassin user, add “score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0” to your local.cf file to disable that rule).
EDIT: Mike has some more background on the bug.
EDIT: Fix it out on the spamassassin homepage.

News and links 12/31/09

We’re iced in here in DC so I’ve been catching up with some industry news while camped in front of a heater and the TV.
Best of the ESPs by Forrester Research. Congrats to ET and Responsys for coming out on top. The results, as reported by MediaPost, match reasonably well with my overall impressions of the industry (so they must be right!)
Return Path is rolling out a new version of SenderScore. A welcome change for those of us who regularly refer to an IP’s sender score and find it doesn’t match other data.
CAUCE has done a series of posts looking back at significant events in spam over the last decade.
Al has a retrospective on various data breaches affecting email addresses over the last few years.
Happy New Year, everyone!

Holiday Break

I did have the absolute best of intentions to finish the Ugly part of my series on “The Good, The Typical and the Ugly” while on the plane yesterday. But, as things sometimes go, it didn’t happen. Blogging will be light through Jan 4th as I’m actually taking some time to visit family, relax and recharge. When I get back I’ll have a post about the ugly end of senders and ESPs as well as some advice on how to join the ranks of the good. I’m also planning to have some new resources available and announced early in January.
May everyone traveling have safe journeys. Happy Christmas.

Typical ESPs

Yesterday, I gave examples of good ESPs and the benefits that their customers receive from their high standards and standards enforcement. Today I’ll be talking about typical ESPs and the things they say and do.
A few caveats before I get started. Most of these quotes are composite quotes. I am not quoting one particular person or ESP, rather, the statement is representative of a common view point. None of these quotes is a one off, all of these quotes have been said by more than one person. These where chosen as a representation of some of the attitudes and policies that leads ISPs and filtering companies to throw up their hands at the ESPs.