March 2016 in Spamtraps: ESPs and Social Networks
ESP mail seen in spamtraps March 2016
Coming in a little late this month. The percentage of ESP sent mail vs all mail seen in the spamtraps is only 0.6% this month; it has to do both with seeing less ESP mail (about 80% of last month’s figures), and a huge increase in botnet spam. Technically, this is a top 11 list this month because Topica and Oracle Marketing Cloud managed to match spam counts so closely that a comparison would be meaningless.
| RATING | PARTICIPANT | PERCENTAGE | NOTES | MOST PROMINENT CUSTOMER |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | All others | 46.7% | ||
| 1 | SalesForce Marketing Cloud | 10.1% | ExactTarget | Kohls (<4%) |
| 2 | MailChimp | 8.8% | 24% Mandrill, 76% MC proper |
Lulu (<3%) |
| 3 | SendGrid | 8.7% | Yelp (<7%) | |
| 4 | Experian | 4.5% | Express (<6%) | |
| 5 | Constant Contact | 3.8% | Advisor Perspectives (>33%) | |
| 6 | Shared between Topica and OMC | 3.3% | OMC = Responsys, Eloqua and RightNow | Topica: e-dailydealalerts (>80%) OMC: Team Sportia, Sweden (<7%) |
| 7 | Amazon SES | 3.2% | 7dayshop (<9%) | |
| 8 | IBM Marketing Cloud | 3.2% | Silverpop | The DCCC (~7%) |
| 9 | Mailgun | 2.5% | F1 Forum, Finland (<9%) | |
| 10 | Digital Metrics | 2.1% | Hard to tell – domain names look like snowshoe |
Bubbling under, we have WhatCounts (2%), SmartFocus aka EmailVision (1.6%) and Yesmail (1.5%).
Here’s the “relative badness” graph. Topica is scaling down from last month – because we noticed that not all ESPs (Topica and Vertical Response, most notably) use the customers’ domain names in their From:, opting for CUSTOMER(@)app.topica.com or CUSTOMER(@)mail.vresp.com instead, for example. These have been taken into account for those two operations. If you know that something more must be wrong in this figure because of such reasons (or indeed have any criticism of the analyses presented in this blog series), please embarrass me in public (or privately, if you must).
Amount of messages per separate customer of ESP, March 2016
We also have a new table: top spamming customers.
| RATING | CUSTOMER | ESP | % OF THIS ESP | % OF ALL MAIL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | e-dailydealalerts | Topica | 81% | 2.7% |
| 2 | dailystrength.org | WhatCounts | 81% | 1.6% |
| 3 | advisorperspectives.com | Constant Contact | 34% | 1.3% |
On the social networking side, Facebook continues spamming the living daylights out of the world, to the tune of 3.5 times more than all ESPs combined.
Facebook vs all ESPs, March 2016
If Twitter was an ESP, it would have scored #1 on the Top 10 ESP list this month, if only by a very small margin against SMC. (Obviously discounting Facebook from the equation.)
Facebook and Twitter vs. the top 10 ESPs, March 2016
There’s no point graphing Facebook mail subject lines any more; over 90% of it is “give us the login information for your mailbox”, aka “You have more friends on Facebook than you think”. I am really quite appalled at this, and am wondering whether the spam blocklists will ever take note.
Over and out. Thank you for listening! See you again next month.