Jun
08
May 2016 in Spamtraps: ESPs
ESP mail seen in spamtraps May 2016
Just in time for M³AAWG 37 (Philadelphia, PA, Jun 13 to 16) – looking forward to meeting you all in person again!
May
07
April 2016 in Spamtraps: ESPs (and only a word or two about Social Networks)
ESP mail seen in spamtraps April 2016
The percentage of ESP sent mail vs all mail seen in the spamtraps is back to normal levels, 1.5% this month. Social networks account for 3.9% of all mail, of which nearly 93% is Facebook. Facebook is “only” sending 2.5 times as much mail as all tracked ESPs combined, which would be a reduction of 30%… if it wasn’t the case that ESPs were sending more mail than last month, and Facebook was simply keeping up their old levels.
Apr
20
Filip Poutintsev, Spam Apologist
A recent post on LinkedIn from Finland’s finest is claiming to debunk all the arguments for why spam might be bad.
Filip, it doesn’t occur to you that the Internet community understood this to be the case long before big mail receivers and ESPs existed? You might wish to google Gary Thuerk, for example. On May 3, 1978, when he sent the first spam ever, you were all of minus nine years old, weren’t you. 🙂
So cut out the paranoia, it got old long before you had even got into the business.
Apr
09
March 2016 in Spamtraps: ESPs and Social Networks
ESP mail seen in spamtraps March 2016
Coming in a little late this month. The percentage of ESP sent mail vs all mail seen in the spamtraps is only 0.6% this month; it has to do both with seeing less ESP mail (about 80% of last month’s figures), and a huge increase in botnet spam. Technically, this is a top 11 list this month because Topica and Oracle Marketing Cloud managed to match spam counts so closely that a comparison would be meaningless.
Mar
07
Capital One: Poster Boy for Poor Security and Privacy
Capital One, a large US-based bank and credit card issuer, stands out for sending by far the largest number of transactional emails containing personally identifying information (PII) to my spamtrap collection. :/ Capital One uses a number of ESPs, but its transactional emails are usually sent from Bigfoot Interactive, owned by Epsilon Interactive.
Mar
04
February 2016 in Spamtraps: ESPs
(And a word about some social networks)
ESP mail seen in spamtraps February 2016
Do remember to read this ’til the bitter end… it’s a tad longer than usual.
Let’s start the post that includes spam from MAAWG 36 week (hi y’all! great catching up with you!) with the standard stuff. Somewhere during the latter part of the month, we collated all of Oracle Marketing Cloud into one; no more separate Responsys, Eloqua and RightNow. Having said that, the contributions from the latter two are so small as to be practically meaningless.
The percentage of ESP sent mail vs all mail seen in the spamtraps is 1.5% this month.
Feb
29
Penton Media: Spamming a Scraped Contact Email Address
Penton Media, a marketing firm with a past history of sending opt-out bulk email (spam), is emailing bulk advertisements to the contact email address for my personal blog (tw86034@ergosphere.net). The ESP is the Oracle Marketing Cloud, which is the combination of former ESPs Eloqua and Responsys, both of which Oracle now owns.
Feb
04
January 2016 in spamtraps: Facebook
What is going on? Facebook is hitting spamtraps like there’s no tomorrow. The comparison is against the total mail volume in the same spamtraps of the top three ESPs combined.
Feb
02
Microsoft Office 365: How to spam with impunity
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200769%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx is useless. If you want to spam with no action whatsoever from the 800 pound gorilla of email, who are also too large to be added to any blocklists anywhere, sign up with Office 365 and there you go.
Recent player: Markkinointirekisteri.fi, Finnish vendor of spam lists going back at least six years.
Feb
01
January 2016 in spamtraps: ESPs
ESP mail seen in spamtraps January 2015
We’ve come full circle; this is the first post of the new year. Thanks to all who are keeping up with the series. Hope to see you in Frisco in two weeks.
The percentage of ESP sent mail vs all mail seen in the spamtraps is 1.4% this month.
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