CheetahMail
This morning I have been looking through my spamtrap collector for mainsleaze spam to report here, to get this blog started. After listing a couple of spams, I looked at the last few spam reports. With one exception, they’re all from Cheetahmail (Experian).
So I just searched the last week’s worth of spam in my spamtrap collector for any spam from IP ranges that I know belong to CheetahMail. In addition to the four spam reports so far, in the past week one or more of my spamtraps have received the following mainsleaze spam from Cheetahmail:
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From: AT&T
Subject: Welcome To AT&T
(Spamtraps don’t sign up for phone service.) -
From: Barnes & Noble
Subject: BOO! Don’t Be Scared to Save Up to 30% On Halloween Essentials!
(Spamtraps don’t buy books.) -
From: Dr Pierre Ricaud par MailAdvantages
Subject: -50% sur les soins best-sellers et une montre offerte
(Spamtraps don’t use makeup.) -
From: LinkedIn
Subject: So now you’re on LinkedIn: What’s next?
(Spamtraps don’t look for work or use social media.)
NOTE: Hit twenty-two spamtraps in the past week, excluding the IRS phish emails with forged LinkedIn headers which are currently spewing. -
From: MY M&M’S Brand
Subject: 10% OFF! Special Offer from MY M&M’S
(Spamtraps don’t eat.) -
From: TravelSmith
Subject: Time’s Up! Fall Savings Event Ends Tonight
(Spamtraps don’t buy clothes.)
This is nuts. A legitimate ESP will occasionally have a spamming customer. (And a legitimate company will occasionally have an old or typoed email address on its list.) But no legitimate ESP should be hitting spamtraps in these numbers. CheetahMail, what the HELL is going on here?
Cheetahmail is on our radar at present. It isn’t simply that they seem to send more spam than most other ESPs, but that they appear reluctant to act decisively even when we report it. Most ESPs listen to Spamhaus; it isn’t as if we target their email for special attention.
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You mention ‘my spamtraps’ were receiving email. I thought spam traps were part of the ISP world. How did you create yours?
Spamtraps are part of the antispam world. ISPs, private companies, and private individuals who research spam for spam filters, blocklists, and reputation services have them. Even a few ESPs do; they make an excellent in-house quality check on lists that clients bring to them.
I gathered mine from a number of sources over the past fifteen years. Some are email addresses that never existed at domains that I have owned from the beginning. Others are old email addresses at those domains that I closed many years ago. Others are all email addresses at domains whose registration lapsed and that I then acquired. And yet others were donated by various individuals and companies.
For any email address whose history I did not personally know (most of them), I left them disabled for at least a year. (Twelve consecutive months.) I call that the “timeout period”; others have other names. It’s generally considered a “best practice” to leave email addresses disabled for a period of from six months (IMO not long enough) to a year, so that legitimate bulk emailers see the bounced emails and remove the closed email addresses from their lists.
Maybe I’ll write a FAQ on this…. 🙂
Laura Atkins already has a writeup on the topic that I find pretty comprehensive.
Even Lyris is powering spamming companies to use their platform. Why are these ESPs not bothered to look at their client’s privacy policies and subscriptions?