February 2017 in Spamtraps: ESPs
ESP mail seen in spamtraps, February 2017
This is the post-MAAWG post. Thanks to all we met in SF.
The noteworthy bit this month is that it seems to have taken us nearly half a year to notice that Teradata and Blue Hornet were merged into Mapp Digital. The resulting operation is large enough to be visible on this Top 10 ESP Spam list. Since Teradata and Blue Hornet have both been popping up in the runners-up section, this is not surprising.
This month’s runner-up is noteworthy because of their noteworthy customer who shows up in the “worst customers overall” list.
The percentage of ESP sent mail vs all mail seen in the spamtraps is 3.4%, which is unusually large. The explanation must have something to do with botnets going AWOL – the amount of ESP mail is up only 10% from last month, with the total amount of mail down 46% from January.
The amount of really low-quality garbage from AWeber continues, and continues to surprise me.
Bubbling under this month: Epsilon (2.4%)
| RATING | PARTICIPANT | PERCENTAGE | NOTES | MOST PROMINENT CUSTOMER |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | All others | 41.2% | ||
| 1 | SalesForce Marketing Cloud | 11.3% | ExactTarget | Bath and Body Works (<7%) |
| 2 | SendGrid | 11.2% | cadremploi.fr (<5%) | |
| 3 | Experian | 7.4% | Walgreens (<12%) | |
| 4 | MailChimp | 7.0% | (7% Mandrill) | eccp.com (<1%) |
| 5 | Constant Contact | 4.1% | Advisor Perspectives (<42%) | |
| 6 | Amazon SES | 3.9% | VetUK.co.uk (<16%) | |
| 7 | Oracle Marketing Cloud | 3.5% | Responsys, Eloqua and RightNow | Nordstrom (<11%) |
| 8 | Mapp Digital | 3.0% | Teradata and Blue Hornet | Brenda Watson (<32%) |
| 9 | IBM Marketing Cloud | 2.6% | Silverpop, Unica | The DCCC (<11%) |
| 10 | AWeber | 2.5% | Various make-money-fast spammers (top 5 amounting to slightly less than 40%) |
Here’s the “relative badness” graph, with Digital Metrics “leading” the way. French ESP Edatis is still at #25 of top 30 with brainovloa.com, maxiassure.fr and chamel.fr still being responsible for over 75% of what they are spewing. Epsilon has one customer over all others who takes them to #4 on this graph, and this is with counting all of their ccTLD instances separately; eliminating that factor changes their badness to nearly that of Edatis, but does not change their position on the chart.
Average amount of messages per separate customer of ESP, February 2017
Finally, the “top spamming customers” table.
| RATING | CUSTOMER | ESP | % OF THIS ESP | % OF ALL ESP MAIL IN SPAMTRAPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Advisor Perspectives | Constant Contact | 42% | 1.7% |
| 2 | PayPal | Epsilon | 57% | 1.4% |
| 2 | Brenda Watson | Mapp Digital | 32% | 0.9% |
| 3 | Walgreens | Experian | 12% | 0.9% |
| 4 | Bath and Body Works | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | 7% | 0.8% |