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.
| 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%) |
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.
Unfortunately we’re not going to be able to attend the #emailexpert Inbox Expo in London in the upcoming March ourselves, but that won’t stop us from giving the summit and its chief protagonist Andrew Bonar some free advertising here on Mainsleaze. We’ve collaborated with him at least since his times at Emailvision and have watched the progress from email service provider abuse desk to deliverability expert to all-around email industry icon with great pleasure and we’re delighted to be able to help spread the word about this event.
I’ll happily wear a tee but I would do this for you, Andrew, even without one 😉 Cheers, Atro
Another couple of months have passed by so quickly and I only just found I had even completed the October report but forgotten to release it…
The percentages of ESP spam in the traps were, respectively, 3.0%, 3.4%, 3.0% and 2.8% during this period.
Ediware disappeared back into the void it had come from after the Oct 24 disaster. All other operations on the list are household names.
Salesforce keep increasing their lead over the competition.
I am pleased to see that SendGrid made Advisor Perspectives disappear after the very beginning of November. Nobody could guess what explains the simultaneous rise in Zeta Interactive’s spam output, from relative obscurity (#28 in October) to #11 in November and the Top Ten in December-January.
Looking forward to seeing you all in San Francisco in a few weeks!
The study of forensics refers to scientific tests or techniques used in connection with the detection of crime. It is an odd choice of name for what I think is a data seller, especially one whose targeting seems poor enough to be spamming me. They claim to want to help me generate more leads for my website, but my website doesn’t sell anything. I do not really need any leads.
They are sending from IP address 46.236.37.232, which appears to be an email platform called Message Focus or Adestra.
From what I can tell, the only forensic capability this entity has shown me is that they seem to buy B2B spam leads, which is very disappointing.
It was reported in Finnish news about a week ago that Suomen Asiakastieto Oyj has purchased Emaileri. Apparently this is important enough to be reported elsewhere, such as in Financial Times.
