January 2017 in Spamtraps: ESPs
ESP mail seen in spamtraps, January 2017
This post marks the second anniversary of this series (which was not intended to become a series or any sort of regular occurrence in the first place). I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who is paying attention and sharing these posts in social media, and I’m very much looking forward to meeting a significant part of you all in two weeks – that is, assuming that Finns with ESTA are still allowed in. 😀
I have no special theme in mind for this month. It’s the usual suspects, with Dyn having cleaned up and dropped to #27. AWeber stays in and even surpassed IBM Mkt Cloud and Mailgun, my favourite Danish folks have reduced volume (but not the bad customers) enough to stay out of the measurements altogether, and MailMinion are somehow still in business despite having been SBLed for half a year already.
The percentage of ESP sent mail vs all mail seen in the spamtraps is 1.6%. The amount of ESP mail was down 15% from last month, with the total amount of mail up almost 60% from December.
The top ten this month consists of the usual suspects aside from AWeber, with MailChimp having dropped to an unusual #4 to give way to Experian.
AWeber unfortunately continues to have an ongoing problem with make-money-fast spammers. Their output in our traps has grown to almost five times what they had in July 2016; I spoke to their representative in MAAWG 37 and they were doing very well at the time, which they were attributing to their fantastic vetting processes and automation. Something must have changed since then, and it’s not pretty.
Bubbling under this month: Sailthru (1.7%), Teradata (1.5%).
| RATING | PARTICIPANT | PERCENTAGE | NOTES | MOST PROMINENT CUSTOMER |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | All others | 42.0% | ||
| 1 | SalesForce Marketing Cloud | 11.9% | ExactTarget | bathandbodyworks (<11%) |
| 2 | SendGrid | 10.9% | cadremploi.fr (<6%) | |
| 3 | Experian | 7.5% | Target (<9%) | |
| 4 | MailChimp | 7.0% | (8% Mandrill) | limbino.com (<1%) |
| 5 | Amazon SES | 4.3% | VetUK.co.uk (>21%) | |
| 6 | Constant Contact | 3.9% | Advisor Perspectives (38%) | |
| 7 | Oracle Marketing Cloud | 3.8% | Responsys, Eloqua and RightNow | Nordstrom (10%) |
| 8 | AWeber | 2.6% | Various make-money-fast spammers (top 5 amounting to 40%) | |
| 9 | IBM Marketing Cloud | 2.5% | Silverpop, Unica | The DCCC (<7%) |
| 10 | Rackspace Mailgun | 2.0% | secretflirt4u.co (<11%) |
Here’s the “relative badness” graph. It’s back to what it would usually look like, with Digital Metrics “leading” the way, and French ESP Edatis showing up at #23 of top 30 with brainovloa.com, maxiassure.fr and chamel.fr being responsible for over 90% of what they are spewing.
Average amount of messages per separate customer of ESP, January 2017
Finally, the “top spamming customers” table.
| RATING | CUSTOMER | ESP | % OF THIS ESP | % OF ALL ESP MAIL IN SPAMTRAPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Advisor Perspectives | Constant Contact | 38% | 1.5% |
| 2 | Bath and Body Works | SalesForce Marketing Cloud | 11% | 1.3% |
| 3 | VetUK.co.uk | Amazon SES | 21% | 0.9% |
| 4 | Target | Experian | 8.5% | 0.6% |
| 5 | Cadremploi.fr | SendGrid | 6% | 0.6% |