MainSleaze

Topica, one of the older ESPs in existence, emailed about 150 spamtraps today with spam for payday loans and other questionable or outright fraudulent financial products. Topica has been emailing spamtraps with this sort of garbage for the past year or two, but the volume is increasing.

Several years had passed since I saw significant amounts of spam from Topica, although it has a terrible reputation and spammed heavily in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The reason for the current spam flood can be found in the spam sample below; Topica is allowing the payday loan industry to send affiliate spam from their IPs. The email practices of this industry are so poor that most ESPs will not take Payday Loan companies as customers. I see quite a bit of Payday Loan industry spam, but almost all of it comes from snowshoe spammers, not from IPs belonging to an allegedly legitimate ESP.

Due to both its history and its current practices, I strongly recommend blocking all Topica IPs. Many larger ESPs send more spam than Topica does, but I can’t think of another ESP that I track that appears to send nothing but spam.

Sending IP: 66.227.62.183
Topica IP Ranges: 66.227.60.0/22

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from out183.topica-silver-y.com (out183.topica-silver-y.com [66.227.62.183])
        by <xxx> (Postfix) with SMTP id <xxx>
        for v; Tue, 12 Aug 2014 09:##:## +0000 (UTC)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
To: <xxx>
From: 100StarPayday <alsmail@app.topica.com>
Subject: Need Funds Quickly? Fast Approval
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 02:##:## -0700
Message-ID: <<xxx>@alsmail.b.topica.com>
Errors-To: <<xxx>@alsmail.b.topica.com>

Readable Email:

From: 100StarPayday <alsmail@app.topica.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Need Funds Quickly? Fast Approval

All Situations Accepted. Click <a href=”http://alsmail.c.topica.com/<xxx>/”>here</a> to get more information.

This advertisement was sent by an ‘100 Star Payday’ Affiliate. To STOP commercial e-mail from us and remove your e-mail address from future mailings, you may copy and paste this link and follow the instructions: click here or, you may print out a copy of the ad and send a letter to: 100 Star Payday, P.O. Box 803338 #36370 Chicago, IL 60680-3338.

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