MainSleaze

We’ve been active, but Atro has mostly been posting on LinkedIn. It’s somewhat easier than using the blog platform. But since we keep hearing it from you that new employees at ESPs are frequently advised to keep an eye on this blog by their more experienced colleagues, let’s try to make an effort here and justify that advice.

Once again, a trendline post. The percentages of ESP mail from all spam the traps saw was more or less 6.6% across the entire period, with slight variations.

The top contenders continue to remain all alone in their heights. Any interesting movements are occurring in the #5 to #15 slots.

Mailgun showed absolute growth in numbers across the entire period and finally surpassed OMC in April. From February on, this is due to a collections agency in the UK, it seems.

Epsilon’s trend is also consistently upward. DICK’S Sporting Goods, Inc. is responsible for half of what they send to us.

Finally, Mailjet took a huge leap in April compared to the rest of the observation period. Interestingly enough, their worst customer is the same as that of Mailgun – a collection agency in the United Kingdom. Not only the same kind of, but actually the same domain names.

Okay, so here’s the last post of 2020, a day or two late.

It really seems as if the SendGrid flood that there was during the autumn is over. There’s still a lot of mail, and some of it is still stuff that no ESP customer should be sending, but the numbers are more or less back to normal, which is nice.

We’ve done something strange, or spammers have done something strange, I don’t know. The proportion of ESP spam to all spam we’ve seen keeps growing. The numbers remain more or less the same, while the total goes down, so I guess either the botnets are spewing less, or we’re ignoring them better. The percentage of ESP spam to all was a whopping 8.1% this month.

Then there’s the relative badness.

As always, the “relative badness” figure is obtained by dividing the total number of messages sent to us by an ESP by the apparent number of its customers participating in it.

The biggest customers in the badness chart are DICK’S Sporting Goods for Epsilon (almost 40% of Epsilon’s total catch in our traps); the Republican party (over 70% of what Pulsepoint sent); Costco (over a third of what we got from WhatCounts) and Pandora, which amounted to almost half of the Adobe contribution.

That’s all, folks! Happy New Year, may it be less interesting in the Chinese sense than the one we just left behind.