What … is your name?

For some reason otherwise legitimate ESPs have over the years picked up a habit of obfuscating who they are.
I don’t mean those cases where they use a customers subdomain for their infrastructure or bounce address. If the customer is Harper Collins then mail “from” @bounce.e.harpercollins.com sent from a server claiming to be mail3871.e.harpercollins.com isn’t unreasonable. (Though something in the headers that identified the ESP would be nice).
No, I mean random garbage domains created by an ESP to avoid using their real domains in the mail they send and in their network infrastructure. This isn’t exactly snowshoe behaviour. They’re not really hiding anything terribly effectively from someone determined to identify them – the domains are registered with real contact information, and the IP addresses the mail is sent from are mostly SWIPped accurately – but they do prevent a casual observer from identifying the sender.
Silverpop has registered over 9,000 domains in .com that are just “mkt” followed by some random digits that they use for infrastructure hostnames, bounce addresses and click-tracking links. Apart from anything else, it’s a terrible waste of domain name space to use links.mkt1572.com where they could just as well use links1572.silverpop.com or links.mkt1572.silverpop.com.
For what they’re paying just for domain name registration and management they could probably hire multiple full time employees.
And Marketo has registered over 17,000 domains in .com that are just “mkto-” followed by what looks like a location code.
(I’m not picking on Marketo and Silverpop in particular – several other notable ESPs do the exact same thing – they’re just relevant to the end of the story).
Using garbage domains like this makes you look more like a snowshoe spammer at first glance than a legitimate ESP.
It also makes it much harder for a human glancing at your headers to correctly identify a responsible party …
… which is probably why abuse@marketo are rather tired of receiving misdirected complaints about spam sent by Silverpop from machines called something like mkt1572.com.
 
 

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TWSD: Privacy protection for commercial domains

One of my major pet peeves is supposedly legitimate companies hiding behind privacy protection in their whois records. There is absolutely no reason for a legitimate company to do this. There are lots of reasons a non-legitimate company might want to hide behind privacy services, but I have never heard a good reason for legitimate companies to hide.
Look, a company sending any commercial email is required by law to provide a physical postal address in every email they send. What point is there, then, to hiding addresses in whois records? The only thing it does is make a sender look like a spammer. If a sender is a business, then they need to have a real business address anyway, and that address should be available in their domain registration.
It may seem like a trivial point, it may seem minor, but spammers use domain privacy services to hide the various tendrils of their businesses. They don’t want anyone to be able to tell that domain A is related to domain B is related to domain C. Proxy services let them trivially hide their identities. This is the major business use of privacy protection. Real companies don’t need to hide behind privacy services.
Using domain privacy services make senders look like spammers. One trivial thing that ISPs can do is stop providing FBLs or whitelistings to domains behind privacy services. This will weed out spammers without doing harm to real senders. Certification services can refuse to certify companies that hide their identity. My small contribution to the cause is to refuse to represent any company to an ISP if their domain is behind a privacy service.
Just to be clear, I have no problem with personal, non-business domains using privacy services. There are valid reasons individuals may want to hide their physical location. But businesses? Step up and quit hiding.
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Symbolics made lisp machines – symbolics.com is now owned by a domain speculator.
BBN is a technology R&D company who’ve worked on everything. If I had to pick one thing they were involved with it’d be the Internet Message Processor – the router used on the very first Internet nodes. They are still around, as a division of Raytheon.
Think.com made some amazing massively parallel computers. Their hardware group was bought out by Sun, who were bought out by Oracle and think.com now redirects to a broken error page at oracle.com.
Mcc.com were the first – and for a while, the largest – computing research and development consortium in the US. They did groundbreaking work on everything from silicon to AI. Their domain is now a generic parked page owned by a domain speculator.
Dec.com were Digital Equipment Corporation – creators of the PDP, VAX, Alpha and StrongARM processors, amongst many other things. They were a huge company when I worked for them designing Alpha CPUs in the mid 90s, then they were acquired by Compaq, then HP, then split up. Their domain is now a personal website.
It took nearly three years to reach 100 registered .com domains and nearly 10 years to reach 9,000.
As of this morning there are 116,621,517 domains registered in .com, from (64 zeros).com to (64 letter z).com, out of a possible total of more than two googol – so there’s still a domain there for you.
221,848 of those domains in .com mention “mail”.

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