TWSD: Mail known spam trap addresses

One of the things we all “know” is that if spammers get their hands on spamtrap addresses then they’ll stop sending mail to those addresses. This is true for a lot of spammers, but sadly it’s not true for all.
I don’t think it’s any secret that I consult for all types of mailers, from those who just need a little tune up to those who want me to help them avoid filters and blocking. During some of these consulting projects, I use my own spam folder as research and provide information on the spam that I am receiving from them.
A few years ago I was working with a company who hires a lot of different affiliates to send acquisition email. A few of their affiliates had really poor practices and they were trying to figure out which affiliates were the problem. I handed over a number of mails from my personal spam traps, in order to help them identify the problem affiliate.
I told them, and their affiliate, what my spamtrap addresses were. And, for many years I stopped receiving that particular spam. But, over the last few weeks I’ve seen a significant uptick in spam advertising my former client.
I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone that handing over spamtraps is a good thing. But there is at least some evidence out there that they’re not even competent enough to permanently remove traps. I really have to wonder at how sloppy some marketers are, too, that they’ll hire spammers and not at least hand over a list of addresses they know are bad addresses to mail.
I really thought spammers were smarter than that. I am, apparently, wrong.
EDIT: Of course, mailing this spamtrap gets them nothing but a little ranty blog post here. It doesn’t result in blocking, or disconnection from their ISP or their ESP or anything else. I suspect if there was actually an affect, like, say, I started forwarding this mail to Spamhaus or other filtering companies, they might stop mailing this address. Anyone want a 20 year old, slightly used spam trap?
 

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Harvesting and forging email addresses

For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam.
Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website less than a month and I’m already getting lots of spam to it. Most of it is business related spam, but there’s a couple things that make me think that someone has been signing that address up to mailing lists.
One is the confirmation email I received from Yelp. I don’t actually believe Yelp harvested my address and tried to create me an email account. I was happy when I got the first mail from Yelp. It said “click here to confirm your account.” Yay! Yelp is actually using confirmations so I just have to ignore the mail and that will all go away.
At least I was happy about it, until I started getting Yelp newsletters to that address.
Yelp gets half a star for attempting to do COI, but loses half for sending newsletters to people who didn’t confirm their account.
I really didn’t believe that people would grab a clearly tagged address off the blog and subscribe it to mailing lists or networking sites. I simply didn’t believe this happened anymore. I know forge subscribing used to be common, but it does appear that someone forge signed me up for a Yelp account. Clearly there are more dumb idiots out there than I thought.
Of course, it’s not just malicious people signing the address up to lists. There are also spammers harvesting directly off the website.
I did expect that there would be some harvesting going on and that I would get spam to the address. I am very surprised at the volume and type of spam, though. I’m getting a lot of chinese language spam, a lot of “join our business organization” spam and mail claiming I subscribed to receive their offers.
Surprisingly, much of the spam to this address violates CAN SPAM in some way shape or form. And I can prove harvesting, which would net treble damages if I had the time or inclination to sue.
It’s been an interesting experience, putting an unfiltered address on the website. Unfortunately, I am at risk of losing your questions because of the amount of spam coming in. I don’t think I’ve missed any, yet, but losing real mail is always a risk when an address gets a lot of spam – whether or not the recipient runs filters.
I’m still pondering solutions, but for now the questions address will remain as it is.

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Do you have an abuse@ address?

I’ve mentioned multiple times before that I really don’t like using personal contacts until and unless the published or official channels fail. I don’t hold this opinion just about resolving delivery issues, but also use official channels when reporting spam to one of my addresses or spam traps.
My usual complaints contain a plain text copy of the mail, including full headers and a short summary of the email address it was sent to. “This is an address that was part of a leak from…” or “This is an address scraped off my website. It’s been removed from the website since 2004” or “This address isn’t used to sign up for any mail.”
Sadly, there are a number of “legitimate” ESPs that don’t have or don’t monitor their abuse address. In some cases it’s an oversight or a break down of internal mail handling. But in most cases, it’s a sign that the ESP doesn’t actually handle abuse.
It’s frustrating to watch an ESP post long blog posts about “best practices” and “effective delivery” and “not spamming” and yet not be able to actually stop their own customers from spamming. It’s not even that I necessarily want them to disconnect their spamming customers (although that would be nice) but suppressing the address that I’ve told them was a spamtrap seems trivial. And yet, a month after my first complaint and weeks after escalating to a personal contact, I’m still getting spam.
The 5 things every ESP should do to handle spam complaints.

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TWSD: Hiding the opt-out


This is an actual opt-out link that came in a recent email. Sadly, this is a real company, listed on the NYSE sent by a major ESP.
 

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