Clickback MAIL hitting dead/invalid emails

Clickback MAIL has been hitting spam trap with email addresses which have been dead for a very long time (i.e. years) or never valid in any decade. Probably because Clickback doesn’t require pesky things like “Opt-In” or “Confirmed” subscribers but do allow purchased lists and “cold” contacts to be mailed. Seriously this is bad behavior, I wonder why no one has just blacklisted all of Clickback IPs/domains yet?

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Spammers abusing U of MN OIT email servers

Some spammers have been abusing the University of Minnesota OIT email servers for months, up to dozens of attempts per day. Abuse@ and postmaster@ were notified with overwhelming evidence months ago but the spam continues to trickle through.

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Very persistent Finnish B2B spammer: Seolocation Oy (d/b/a Afton Videot)

Seolocation Oy (biz reg, responsible people) are really persistent B2B spammers.

They’re also listed by Suomispam.

$ host -t txt afton.fi.dbl.suomispam.net
afton.fi.dbl.suomispam.net descriptive text "20170411 "
$ host -t txt aftonvideopalvelu.fi.dbl.suomispam.net
aftonvideopalvelu.fi.dbl.suomispam.net descriptive text "20170320 "

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B2B Spam from Oracle

Below is another example of B2B spam sent by a large, legitimate company, this time by Oracle. This spam was sent to a pristine spamtrap that follows the format of normal email addresses at the company in question, but does not actually belong to the person that received the spam. Unlike the IBM B2B prospecting spam I reported a few days ago, Oracle sent this spam from its ESP, the Oracle Marketing Cloud.

NOTE [5/19/2017]: An Oracle representative notified me that the IP address that sent the spam is NOT part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, although that IP belongs to Oracle.

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B2B Prospecting Spam from IBM

This week two fellow antispam activists, one of whom has been active in the field for over 20 years, reported receiving spam from the same IBM employee about the IBM Watson platform. One of the spams was sent to the business email address of the recipient. The other was sent to a pristine spamtrap that follows the formats usually used for email addresses at the company, but has never actually been used by the intended recipient. The spams were not sent through the IBM Watson Marketing Cloud (formerly SilverPop), but from its corporate mailservers.

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April 2017 in Spamtraps: ESPs

ESP mail seen in spamtraps, April 2017

ESP mail seen in spamtraps, April 2017

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Newest conman on the Estonian/Finnish B2B spam block: Ville Ryynänen, Ryynänen Consulting OÜ

Would you buy accounting services from somebody whose hand is already in your pocket? I wouldn’t, either. Rule #0: Spam is theft.

The winner this time is Mr Ville Ryynänen, of Ryynänen Consulting OÜ (see corporate and personal LinkedIn profiles; corporate website, inforegister B2B info), who asks Finnish owners of Estonian corporations whether they are happy with their current accountants and if they wouldn’t like to switch.

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March 2017 in Spamtraps: ESPs

ESP mail seen in spamtraps, March 2017

ESP mail seen in spamtraps, March 2017

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PumbaStick, or Take Two of “That which we don’t do”

Pre-consciously inspired by Vernon Schryver, an entity had these things to say today:

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Long-term ESP performance in spamtraps

A collaborator inspired me to draw a few more graphs (you know who you are, and thank you very much for the idea).

I had retained the numbers for the ESP blogs ever since May, so it occurred to me that it might be pertinent to do a time series. The graphs are expressed in percentages against the total amount of ESP spam received, so the growth of total volume (for example, as a result of adding more spamtraps) is already accounted for. Since the data points are naturally mostly at the low end of the scale, a logarithmic scale seemed appropriate.

So, please find enclosed three graphs of ESPs appearing in spamtraps, divided into Transactional, SMB Marketing and Enterprise Marketing. The selection of ESPs and their division to these three categories is according to the ideas of the collaborator. NB. We only started tracing Zeta Interactive in August.
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