Random thoughts on spammers

I recently received a 419 spam that had a message at the top of the email.

Yup, a 419 spammer is trying to convince me there are millions of dollars waiting for me, but he won’t pay his software vendor 29.99 to comply with a license.
This is only the most recent in a long line of examples of spammers being cheap and attempting to steal services.
Back when I was working abuse almost every ISP had a story about a spammer who refused to pay their bill. Or spammers who were so high maintenance they cost the company money.
The company I worked for had a spammer that was on our system for far too long. Eventually they were cut off for non-payment and their hardware was confiscated. Still, the spammer came in and managed to remove the hardware before the building guards were alerted. It was disappointing, but at least they weren’t spamming off our network any longer.
Even now, ESPs share stories of customers who come in, spam and never pay their bill. Works for the spammer, they can get a few weeks of spamming in without having to pay for the service. They spew their stuff and leave a giant mess for the ESP to clean up. Next week, they’re on to the next ESP.
The real problem with this is that with enough ESPs and enough sends you can clean a list. This list can then be sold, or moved to a credible ESP without any of the tell tale signs of a purchased list. It’s so common it even has a name: waterfalling. It’s profitable, though, and there are enough small ESPs out there with little compliance experience that it can work.
I regularly get questions from folks who’ve worked themselves into a hole about swapping IPs or domains in order to get out of the hole. My answer is always the same. Changing identity might work in the short term, but it won’t work longer term. I also tell them that spammers have been trying to avoid filters for a lot longer than they have. Spammers are good at it, and still get caught in filters. Better to spend time trying to fix the underlying problem – typically users aren’t engaged with your mail – then trying to obfuscate who is sending the message to avoid filters.
Focus on sending good email that users want, rather than trying to avoid filters. That’s the key to getting into the inbox.

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TWSD: avoid filters

I was cleaning out one of my spamtraps. This is the one that gets a ton of “legitimate” spam. In the last 12 hours it’s gotten spam advertising: T.G.I.Fridays, KFC, Applebees, LendingTree, Lasix Vision Institute, Khols, Burger King, Match.com, and Vistaprint.
The footer of some of the mails are making me laugh, though. It’s clear they’re trying to comply with CAN SPAM, but are having problems with content filtering. Here’s a brief selection of the footers:
Ondemand Research, 1O5 E.[34th]-Street Ste 144, New Y0rk, NY 1OO16
Ondemand Research, 105 E. 34th Street St #144, New York, NY 10016
0ndemand=Research, 1O5/E/./34th Street Ste 144,New Y0rk,NY=1OO16
Poor OnDemand Research, they just can’t catch a break.
EDIT: Just got a spam for Ruby Tuesday’s using a .pw domain.

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It's not fair

In the delivery space, stuff comes in cycles. We’re currently in a cycle where people are unhappy with spam filters. There are two reasons they’re unhappy: false positives and false negatives.
False positives are emails that the user doesn’t think is spam but goes into the bulk folder anyway.
Fales negatives are emails that the user does thing is spam but is delivered to the inbox.
I’ve sat on multiple calls over the course of my career, with clients and potential clients, where the question I cannot answer comes up. “Why do I still get spam?”
I have a lot of thoughts about this question and what it means for a discussion, how it should be answered and what the next steps are. But it’s important to understand that I, and most of my deliverability colleagues, hate this question. Yet we get it all the time. ISPs get it, too.
A big part of the answer is because spammers spend inordinate amounts of time and money trying to figure out how to break filters. In fact, back in 2006 the FTC fined a company almost a million dollars for using deceptive techniques to try and get into filters. One of the things this company did would be to have folks manually create emails to test filters. Once they found a piece of text that would get into the inbox, they’d spam until the filters caught up. Then, they’d start testing content again to see what would get past the filters. Repeat.
This wasn’t some fly by night company. They had beautiful offices in San Francisco with conference rooms overlooking Treasure Island. They were profitable. They were spammers. Of course, not long after the FTC fined them, they filed bankruptcy and disappeared.
Other spammers create and cultivate vast networks of IP addresses and domains to be used in snowshoeing operations. Still other spammers create criminal acts to hijack reputation of legitimate senders to make it to the inbox.
Why do you still get spam? That’s a bit like asking why people speed or run red lights. You still get spam because spammers invest a lot of money and time into sending you spam. They’re OK with only a small percentage of emails getting through filters, they’ll just make it up in volume.
Spam still exists because spammers still exist.
 

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