January 2015 ESP Spam: Some Notes….

I see that Atro Tossavainen graphed the spam that we saw in January. Atro and I manage a substantial spamtrap collection together, so I have seen what he posted about. Nothing there surprised me except the hugely disproportionate amount of spam Topica sends to our spamtraps. I’ve blogged twice about Topica, and in the last blog recommended blocking their /22 because of the amounts of spam and probability that little or no non-spam email is sent from them any more. However, I did not realize that we were seeing twice as much spam from Topica as from ExactTarget, which sends several orders of magnitude more email than they do.

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When Users Really DO NOT Want Your Email….

As I was looking through today’s crop of ESP-sent, mostly mainsleaze spam, I kept stumbling across spam sent to some of my most amusing spamtraps. These spamtraps are not typotraps so much as obvious forgeries, the sort of thing that users type when they are asked for an email address, do not want to refuse, and yet do not want to receive email from you either. Any company might have one of these on their list, but I found several companies and a number of ESPs sending to several of these obvious forgeries. Today. In the past 24 hours.

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Change.org: Lots of Typoed Signups, Never Detected

Yesterday petition website Change.org emailed updates or confirmations to almost four dozen of my spamtraps, every single one of them a likely typo of a real email address that probably did sign up for this email. Change.org has been emailing many of these email addresses for months without once noticing that nobody is responding to their email. The ESP is Sendgrid.

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Secure America Now: Joe Job? Or Spamming A Purchased/Scraped List?

Secure America Now, a political web site whose splash page promotes the impeachment of U.S. President Barack Obama, just emailed a spamtrap email address at a former European ISP. The email address has not been live for several years, and formerly belonged to a citizen of that country who had no ties to the United States. The email was sent through NationBuilder, a “community organizer” that uses ESP Sendgrid.

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(RESOLVED) Pro-tikkaat.fi / Hailokauppa.fi: Selling trashcans via junk mail… how appropriate

This spammer dude (www, other www, biz reg) made the fatal mistake of spamming via Creamailer, a Finnish white-hat ESP who subcontract with SendGrid, a US-based ESP who don’t like spammers, purchased lists etc. any better.

Displaying severe awesomeness, SendGrid’s automated systems reacted to this transmission and suspended the account before I had even sent in a complaint. A bit later, Creamailer indicated they had had a conversation with the customer, the customer indicated they had used a purchased list and would continue doing so, and so Creamailer showed them the door. I sense more AUP terminations in their immediate future.

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(RESOLVED) MAJ-Yhtiöt Oy: Spamming web harvested addresses with SEO solicitations

MAJ-Yhtiöt Oy (www, biz reg) is spamming. The ESP is SendGrid, who will probably have terminated the sender before I hit “publish” on this post.

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(RESOLVED) Markkinointirekisteri.fi on SendGrid

Aki seems to have some skill in cleaning up, but he’d need m4d $k1llz. This is a spam sent by and on behalf of Suomen Markkinointirekisteri Oy (www, biz reg), one of the Finnish peddlers of purchased email lists.

SendGrid, whose Email and Communications Policy forbids the use of the same, should clean him up pretty soon, I imagine. (In fact I received their report of the same during the writing of this post.) I must admit I’m a little disappointed that they haven’t crosschecked their customer base enough to spot Markkinointirekisteri’s presence before I did.

“Ei roskapostia, kaikki eivät halua sähköpostimainontaa!” is Aki’s slogan. Translation: “No junk email, not everybody wants email marketing!”. So true. I suppose it does not occur to you, Aki, that all unsolicited bulk email is junk email, and that your entire business is built around sending junk email and facilitating others doing the same?

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Finnish Ice Hockey Association / Ilves Solutions Oy (intellia.fi): Spamming to sell tickets to ice hockey games

The Finnish Ice Hockey Association bought a spam campaign from Intellia.fi (Ilves Solutions Oy). As with practically any Finnish B2B spam, the stuff was seen at the addresses of some natural persons, the use of which constitutes a violation of Section 26 of the Act on the Protection of Privacy in Electronic Communications (not to mention that the processing of outdated and erroneous personal data violates Section 9, Paragraph 2 of the Personal Data Act) that have been retrieved from the Finnish Business Information System.
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“The Tea Party”: Spamming a Shiny Brand New Spamtrap *after* the Election

An organization that I did not see or hear from during the recent U.S. Presidential election campaign, The Tea Party, began sending email a couple of days after the election to a brand new shiny spamtrap at a domain that I have owned for some time. This spamtrap has not previously received email from anybody: I enabled it last week after I reviewed my mail logs and noticed that somebody was trying to send email to it. The IP that sent this email belongs to ESP Sendgrid. The domain that sent this email, pd25.com, belongs to what I thought was a rival ESP, ExactTarget. The authorized use policies (AUP) of both ESPs decidedly require that bulk email sent through them be sent only to email addresses that opted in.

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Political Spam Today: Now Obama and Boxer Pile On…

Today’s take: several spamtrap hits from President Barack Obama, with his name front and center in the From header, four spamtrap hits from Senator Barbara Boxer, a few spams from SuperPACs, and a single spam from a peace activist group that only creeps into the category of political spam because it expresses support for a few candidates. If somebody had planned this to remind me that both political campaigns are running less-than-opt-in mailing lists, they could not have done a better job. (The Romney campaign appears to have taken the day off.)

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