December 2015 in spamtraps: ESPs

ESP mail seen in spamtraps December 2015

ESP mail seen in spamtraps December 2015

The percentage of ESP sent mail vs all mail seen in the spamtraps is 1.3% this month.

RATING PARTICIPANT PERCENTAGE NOTES
0 All others 48.0%
1 SalesForce Marketing Cloud 9.3% ExactTarget
2 SendGrid 9.0%
3 MailChimp 8.9% 27% Mandrill, 73% MC proper
4 Experian 5.9%
5 Silverpop 4.5%
6 Topica 3.5%
7 Amazon SES 3.0%
8 Constant Contact 2.9%
9 Responsys 2.5%
10 Rackspace Mailgun 2.4%

Bubbling under: Adobe Campaign (Neolane), eDialog and Marketo, at 1.7% and 1.6% (twice), respectively.

We have a contestant that dropped out of the measurements, but not because they managed to stop hitting spamtraps. MailerMAX was spamming heavily (to the tune of remaining #6 on this month’s list) until they stopped dead after Dec 23, having only completed 74% of the month. Had they continued, they would have made #5 between Experian and Silverpop. My hunch last month that they are not an ESP gained some support as it appears that they lost all of their IP ranges because of having been terminated by an ISP as a side effect of a bunch of Spamhaus listings. Spamhaus listings for ESPs aren’t all that commonplace, and ISP terminations of ESPs must be even rarer.

Another side effect was that some hitherto anonymous domain registrations were uncloaked by the registrars (blueskydeals.com and modusoffers.com), indicating “New Age Media ApS” in South Africa. Of course, ApS is Danish for “limited company”, and anybody who has followed the Scandinavian spam scene for more than a day knows that New Age Media ApS is the Danish person Allan Stolc (see his LinkedIn profile if you want to), who has apparently been in the business of deception for quite some time (see newspaper clipping in Danish from five years ago when he was only 19).

What’s with the Danish connection? It turns out that some of the Lithuanian people at MailerMAX (see for example LinkedIn profile of Ignas Žagrakalys) also studied in Denmark. Quite a few Finnish spammers have also made Denmark… and MailerMax… their home, such as Tuomas Jauhiainen, the “18 year old business prodigy” (see LinkedIn profile, newspaper clipping in Finnish from two years ago).

The “new” graph from last month is even more pronounced than last month. We have a new contestant there, the Italian ESP Digital Metrics SRL (mail-maker.com), whose output is otherwise unremarkable (in bare quantity, that is).

Amount of messages per separate customer of ESP, December 2015

Amount of messages per separate customer of ESP, December 2015

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