December 2020 in Spamtraps: ESPs
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.
| RATING | PARTICIPANT | PERCENTAGE | NOTES | MOST PROMINENT CUSTOMER |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | All others | 33.9% | 259 ESPs identified | |
| 1 | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | 15.6% | Marcus & Millichap (3.5%) | |
| 2 | SendGrid | 13.8% | Uber (7.0%) | |
| 3 | Mailchimp | 8.7% | Spamtrap bias showing | Akcióbazár (<1%) |
| 4 | Amazon SES | 6.3% | Netflix (4.9%) | |
| 5 | Oracle Marketing Cloud | 4.2% | harborfreight.com (3.7%) | |
| 6 | Adobe Campaign | 3.9% | Pandora (49%) | |
| 7 | SendinBlue | 3.0% | sneakyaffiliate.com (10%) | |
| 8 | Epsilon | >2.9% | DICK’S Sporting Goods (40%) | |
| 9 | CheetahMail | <2.9% | Talbots (7.7%) | |
| 10 | Mailgun | 2.7% | Vumedi.com (3.3%) |
with their shares of the total and most prominent customers
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.