Some time ago, a new spam list vendor came to our sights. They are suomitotal.com (anonymized domain registration) and they are mailing out of Elastic Email, selling B2B lists for spamming, predictably by spamming.
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A unidentifiable investment solicitation spammer using an anonymous free GMail address (germany.bestinvest@gmail.com) just emailed to a purchased or email appended list. The list includes two role accounts originally scraped from a website and Whois. I registered the domain for those accounts in the 1990s, and am the only registered owner that domain has ever had. Neither spammed email address *ever* sent email to anybody; they only received email. The ESP was YourMailingListProvider.
Emaileri, a product of Websonic Oy (biz reg, responsible people), fronted by CEO Toni Jalonen, appears to be hell bent on becoming Finland’s #1 spam ESP.
I don’t mean to make this a monthly occurrence, but I figured I’d put it together just out of interest and as a comparison to last month.
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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.
Here’s how the various email service providers (ESPs) rated on our “hitting spamtraps” scale in January 2015:
Florida-based real estate sales firm International Sales Group (ISG) is emailing a list that contains almost a dozen of my spamtraps. Most of those spamtraps were email addresses at real estate firms that went bankrupt between 2008 and 2011. ISG is either emailing a list that they have not contacted in years, or they bought a list or hired an email appender. Their ESP is Vertical Response, whose abuse department appears to have gone AWOL sometime in 2014.
Transportation management consulting company Ahern & Associates, which appeared on the Mainsleaze blog once already, is emailing a large number of spamtraps, at least a half dozen of which are non-typoed pristine spamtraps. This time, they are emailing through ESP Vertical Response, which has been completely unresponsive to spam complaints for the past few months.
