Profiting off spam

The FTC filed suit against Match.com for using fake accounts to entice people into signing up for accounts. (WA Post) Part of the FTC’s allegations include that Match flagged the accounts and prevented them from contacting paying Match users while simultaneously allowing the users to contact free Match users.

Image of a courthouse.

I’m actually surprised the FTC took action. I’m not surprised Match allowed, and possibly even encouraged, fraudulent accounts to send mail to registered users. The revenue they were making from the fraud was significant, according to Match’s own numbers.

Hundreds of thousands of consumers subscribed to Match.com shortly after receiving a fraudulent communication. In fact, Defendant has consistently tracked how many subscribers these communications have generated, typically by measuring the number of consumers who subscribe to Match.com within 24 hours of receiving an advertisement that touts a fraudulent communication. From June 2016 to May 2018, for example, Defendant’s analysis found that consumers purchased 499,691 subscriptions within 24 hours of receiving an advertisement touting a fraudulent communication. FTC Complaint (.pdf)

What doesn’t surprise me is that Match didn’t stop the outbound abuse. There are a lot of technology companies that will protect their own users and their own networks, while continuing to profit off of abuse of other networks. I’ve repeatedly talked with companies having delivery problems and pointed out that the fraud was a likely part of the delivery problems. I’ve rarely found any company that cared about fraud that was making them money.

An open is not permission
Tulsi v. Google: 1st amended complaint

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September 2016: The month in email

Happy October, everyone. As we prepare to head to London for the Email Innovations Summit, we’re taking a look back at our busy September. As always, we welcome your feedback, questions, and amusing anecdotes. Seriously, we could use some amusing anecdotes. Or cat pictures.
 
San Francisco and Coit tower
We continued to discuss the ongoing abuse and the larger issues raised by attacks across the larger internet infrastructure. It’s important to note that even when these attacks aren’t specifically targeting email senders, security issues affect all of us. It’s important for email marketers to understand that increased attacks do affect how customers view the email channel, and senders must take extra care to avoid the appearance of spam, phishing, or other fraudulent activity. I summarized some of the subscription form abuse issues that we’re seeing across the web, and noted responses from Spamhaus and others involved in fighting this abuse. We’re working closely with ESPs and policy groups to continue to document, analyze and strategize best practices to provide industry-wide responses to these attacks.
I was pleased to note that Google is stepping up with a new program, Project Shield, to help journalists and others who are being targeted by these attacks by providing hosting and DDoS protections.
I’m also delighted to see some significant improvements in email client interactions and user experiences. I wrote a bit about some of those here, and I added my thoughts to Al’s discussion of a new user interaction around unsubscribing in the iOS 10 mail client, and I’ll be curious to see how this plays out across other mail clients.
For our best practices coverage, Steve wrote about global suppression lists, and the ways these are used properly and improperly to prevent mail to certain addresses. I wrote about using the proper pathways and workflows to report abuse and get help with problems. I also wrote about the ways in which incentivizing address collection leads to fraud. This is something we really need to take seriously — the problem is more significant than some bad addresses cluttering up your lists. It contributes to the larger landscape of fraud and abuse online, and we need to figure out better ways to build sustainable email programs.
Is there such a thing as a perfect email? I revisited a post from 2011 and noted, as always, that a perfect email is less about technology and more about making sure that the communication is wanted and expected by the recipient. I know I sound like a broken record on this point (or whatever the 21st century equivalent metaphor of a broken record is….) but it’s something that bears repeating as marketers continue to evolve email programs.
We had a bit of a discussion about how senders try to negotiate anti-spam policies with their ESPs. Is this something you’ve experienced, either as a sender or an ESP?
In Ask Laura, I covered shared IP addresses and tagged email addresses, questions I get fairly frequently from marketers as they enhance their lists and manage their email infrastructures. As always, we welcome your questions on all things email delivery related.

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March 2017: The Month in Email

It’s that time again… here’s a look at our last month of blog posts. We find it useful to recap each month, both to track trends and issues in email delivery and to provide a handy summary for those who aren’t following along breathlessly every single day. Let us know if you find it useful too!

As always, I wrote about email filters. It’s so important to recognize that filters aren’t arbitrary — they’re detailed instructions that help meet specific user needs, and the more you are cognizant of that, the better you’ll be able to work with them. Additionally, filters aren’t perfect and likely never will be. False positives and false negatives are frustrating, but as long as spam is still a viable business for spammers, they’ll continue to figure out how to work around filters. As such, we can’t expect filters to be 100% accurate in determining what constitutes wanted and unwanted mail.
Part of this, of course, is due to the problem of fraudulent signups. Companies aren’t particularly vigilant about address acquisition and hygiene, and as a result, they’ll claim you “signed up” for their email when you did not. Some people believe that a confirmed opt-in (COI) will solve this problem, but our experience is companies are reluctant to leave revenue on the table, and that they will continue to mail to addresses that have not confirmed.
Address sharing and co-reg is also part of the problem. As we saw in the extensive RCM data breach, many major brands continue to work with third-party senders to send mail in ways that are quite clearly spam. And in more criminal activity, I looked at the rise of botnets and how some of those criminals were brought to justice. In other justice news, there’s been an indictment in the Yahoo breach and another CASL enforcement action.
I wrote a post about bounce handling and “relaying denied” error messages, which are quite rare. It’s useful to have an understanding of these and other error messages, since bounces are sometimes indicative of a larger technical issue, such as when AOL accidentally bounced all messages for a short period last week. Speaking of AOL, we noted that there’s no official timeline for the move from Verizon addresses to AOL addresses following the 2015 acquisition, but it may be worth considering asking your customers to update their addresses.
Spam and filters aren’t the only factors of course. It can be challenging to figure out the multiple factors that make up the black box of delivery. And of course, the most important part of delivery continues to be engagement, engagement, engagement.
I wrote a few posts this month on why I do what I do, and why it’s so important to me. First, I wrote about A Day Without A Woman, and my choice not to participate in offering advice and guidance for that day. The truth is that I enjoy sharing what I know and helping people solve problems. I was honored to be named one of 11 Innovators in Email, and I know that my volunteer work in the industry and my unpaid blogging work is a big part of that. It may sound corny, but I really do believe we are on the front lines of the fight of good vs. evil online, and despite the distractions of politics and world events, we must all continue to do our part.

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April 2017: The Month in Email

April was a big travel month for us. I went to Las Vegas for meetings around the Email Innovations Summit and to New Orleans, where Steve spoke on the closing keynote panel for the EEC conference.
I wrote several posts this month about privacy and tracking, both in email and in other online contexts. It’s increasingly a fact of life that our behaviors are tracked, and I wrote about the need for transparency between companies and those they are tracking. More specifically, I talked about the tradeoffs between convenience and security, and how people may not be aware that they are making these tradeoffs when they use popular mailbox tools like unroll.me. The folks over at ReturnPath added a comment on that post about how they handle privacy issues with their mailbox tools.
Steve contributed several posts this month. First up, a due diligence story about how service providers might look more closely at potential customers for their messaging platforms to help curtail spam and other fraudulent activity. He also looked at the history of “/8” IP blocks, and what is happening to them as the internet moves to IPv6. Steve also added a note about his new DMARC Validation tool, which rounds out a suite of free tools we’ve made available on our site. And finally, he showcased a particularly great email subscription experience from Tor.com — have a look!
I highlighted another post about companies doing things right, this one by Len Shneyder over at Marketingland. In other best practices news, I talked about bounce handling again (I mentioned it last month too), and how complicated it can be. Other things that are complicated: responding to abuse complaints. Do you respond? Why or why not?
Our friends at Sendgrid wrote a great post on defining what spammers and other malicious actors do via email, which I think is a must-read for email marketers looking to steer clear of such activity. Speaking of malicious actors, I wrote two posts on the arrest of one of the world’s top email criminals, Peter Levashov, and speculation that he was involved in the Russian hacking activity around the US elections. We’re looking forward to learning more about that story as it unfolds.

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