Don't spam filter your role accounts

A variety of “amazon.com order confirmations” showed up in my inbox this morning. They were quite well done, looking pretty close to real Amazon branding, so quite a few people will click on them. And they funnel people who do click to websites that contain hostile flash apps that’ll compromise their machines (and steal their private data, login and banking credentials then add them to botnets to attack other sites and so on).
Not good. Just the sort of urgent, high-risk issue that ISP abuse desks really want to hear about. I sent email about it to the ISPs involved, including a copy of the original email. One of them went to iWeb, a big (tens of thousands of servers) hosting company.
This was the response:

<abuse@noc.privatedns.com>: host mott.privatedns.com[174.142.252.34] said: 554 rejected due to spam content (in reply to end of DATA command)

That’s iWeb’s main abuse address for their address space, as registered with ARIN. They even have a comment in their network registration that says “Please use abuse@noc.privatedns.com for abuse issues”.
For email related abuse (spam, malware email, botnets, phishing, viruses, …) almost all valid, actionable abuse reports will include a copy of the email involved. And that’s exactly the sort of content that content-based spam filters do their best to block. That means that putting content-based spam filters on your abuse or security role addresses will prevent you seeing most reports about abusive traffic coming from your network.
There are some companies that have an intentional policy of rejecting most spam reports sent to them so that their abuse metrics look better, and they don’t have to pay for abuse desk staff to handle the high volumes of abuse reports their customers provoke. “Mistakenly” putting spam filters on their abuse alias is one way of doing that – others include using non-standard abuse aliases, demanding reports come in only via web forms, requiring abuse reports be sent in non-human-writable formats while discarding all others, and many more. If you don’t want to behave responsibly it’s easy enough to dodge those reports.
Legitimate companies really want to know about abusive traffic sooner rather than later, so they can shut it down and mitigate the damage as quickly as possible. Email systems are complex, though, and it’s quite easy for an upgrade to spam filtering at a companies main mailserver to mistakenly by applied to abuse@ and security@ aliases – especially when spam filtering or email services are outsourced. And if you’re a company that uses dozens of domains it’s easy to lose track of where mail to abuse@ some of those domains ends up.
If you’re responsible for email, abuse or security at your organization it’s worth occasionally checking that your role accounts actually work. Find yourself a fairly obvious bit of spam, then forward it to your abuse@ role address (with a sentence or two telling your abuse desk that you’re just testing, and can they reply to your mail so you know they received it).
Real spam sent directly to abuse@ role addresses can be a severe problem, but content-based filtering is not the way to deal with it. One approach that we suggest to our Abacus users is to prioritize reports that mention a URL or an IP address on your network, so that legitimate, actionable reports will “bubble up” above any spam.

Spamming ESPs: the followup
On Hiatus

Related Posts

Turn it all the way up to 11

I made that joke the other night and most of the folks who heard it didn’t get the reference. It made me feel just a little bit old.
Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week.
I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where marketers and the folks that run the ISP spam filters end up in the same room. I don’t think the marketers always understand what is happening inside the postmaster and filtering desks on a day to day basis at the ISPs. Legitimate marketing? It’s a small fraction of the mail they deal with. Ken claims that marketing pays the salaries of these employees and they’d be out of a job if marketing didn’t exist. Possibly, but only in the context that they are paid to keep their employers servers up and running so that the giant promises made by the marketing team of faster downloads and better online experiences actually happen.
If there wasn’t an internet and there weren’t servers to maintain, they’d have good jobs elsewhere. They’d be building trains or designing buildings or any of the thousands of other jobs that require smart technical people.
Ken has no idea what these folks running the filters and keeping your email alive deal with on a regular basis. They deal with the utter dregs and horrors of society. They are the people dealing with unrelenting spam and virus and phishing attacks bad enough to threaten to take down their networks and the networks of everyone else. They also end up dealing with law enforcement to deal with criminals. Some of what they do is deal with is unspeakable, abuse and mistreatment of children and animals. These are the folks who stand in front of the rest of us, and make the world better for all of us.
They should be thanked for doing their job, not chastised because they’re doing what the people who pay them expect them to be doing.
Yes, recipients want the mail they want. But, y’know, I bet they really don’t want all the bad stuff that the ISPs protect against. Ken took offense at a statement that he really shouldn’t have. ISPs do check their false positive rates on filtering, and those rates are generally less than 1% of all the email that they filter. Marketers should be glad they’re such a small part of the problem. They really don’t want to be a bigger part.

Read More

Changes at Gmail

As I’ve said before, I can usually tell when some ISP changes their filtering algorithm because I start getting tons and tons of calls about delivery problems at that ISP. This past month it’s been Gmail.
There have been two symptoms I’ve been hearing about. One is an increase in bulk folder delivery for mail that previously was reliably hitting the inbox. The other is a bit more interesting. I’ve heard of 3 different mailers, with good reputations and very clean lists, that are seeing 4xx delays on some of their mail. The only consistency I, and my colleagues at some ESPs, have identified is that the mail is “bursty.”
The senders affected by this do send out mail daily, but the daily mail is primarily order confirmations or receipts or other transactional mails. They send bi-weekly newsletters, though, exploding their volume from a few tens of thousands up to hundreds of thousands. This seems to trigger Gmail to defer mail. It does get delivered eventually. It’s frustrating to try and deal with because neither side is really doing anything wrong, but good senders are seeing delivery delays.
For the bulk foldering, Bronto has a good blog post talking about the changes and offering some solid suggestions for how to deal with them. I’m also hearing from some folks who are reliable that Gmail may be rolling back some of the bulk foldering changes based on feedback from their users.
So if you’re seeing changes at Gmail, it’s not just you.

Read More

Email marketing OF THE FUTURE!

ISPs are continually developing tools for their users. Some of the newer tools are automatic filters that help users organize the volumes of mail they’re getting. Gmail released Priority Inbox over a year ago. Hotmail announced new filters as part of Wave 5 back in October.
All of these announcements cause much consternation in the email marketing industry. Just today there was a long discussion on the Only Influencers list about the new Hotmail filtering. There was even some discussion about why the ISPs were doing this.
I think it’s pretty simple why they’re creating new tools: users are asking for them. The core of these new filters is ISPs reacting to consumer demand. They wouldn’t put the energy into development if their users didn’t want it. And many users do and will use priority inbox or the new Hotmail filtering.
Some people are concerned that marketing email will be less effective if mail is not in the inbox.

Read More