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Evil weasels and random monkeys

I’m doing testing on a new release of Abacus at the moment, so I’m in a software QA (Quality Assurance) frame of mind.
One of the tenets of software QA is “Assume users are malicious”. That’s also one of the tenets of security engineering, but in a completely different way.
A security engineer treats users as malicious, as the users he or she is most concerned about are crackers trying to compromise their system, so they really are malicious. A QA engineer knows that if you have enough users in the field, making enough different mistakes or trying to do enough unusual things, they’ll find all the buggy little corners of your application eventually – and crash it or corrupt data more reliably than a genuinely malicious user.
As a QA engineer it’s easier to personify the forces of chaos you’re defending against as a single evil weasel than a million random monkeys.
In the bulk email world the main points where you interact with your users are signup, confirmation, unsubscription and click-throughs. Always think about what the evil weasel will do at that point.
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Don't think bounce handling is important?

James from Cloudmark has his own insight on spamtraps.

The sledgehammer of confirmed opt-in

We focused Monday on Trend/MAPS blocking fully confirmed opt-in (COI) mail, because that is the Gold Standard for opt-in. It is also Trend/MAPS stated policy that all mail should be COI. There are some problems with this approach. The biggest is that Trend/MAPS is confirming some of the email they receive and then listing COI senders.
The other problem is that typos happen by real people signing up for mail they want. Because MAPS is using typo domains to drive listings, they’re going to see a lot of mail from companies that are doing single opt-in. I realize that there are problems with single opt-in mail, but the problems depends on a lot of factors. Not all single opt-in lists are full of traps and spam and bad data.
In fact, one ESP has a customer with a list of more than 50 million single opt-in email addresses. This sender mails extremely heavily, and yet sees little to no blocking by public or private blocklists.
Trend/MAPS policy is singling out senders that are sending mail people signed up to receive. We know for sure that hard core spammers spend a lot of time and money to identify spamtraps. The typo traps that Trend/MAPS use are pretty easy to find and I have no doubt that the real, problematic spammers are pulling traps out of their lists. Legitimate senders, particularly the ESPs, aren’t going to do that. As one ESP rep commented on yesterday’s post:

A Disturbing Trend

Over the last year or so we’ve been hearing some concerns about some of the blacklisting policies and decisions at Trend Micro / MAPS.
One common thread is that the ESP customers being listed aren’t the sort of sender who you’d expect to be a significant source of abuse. Real companies, gathering addresses from signup forms on their website. Not spammers who buy lists, or who harvest addresses, or who are generating high levels of complaints – rather legitimate senders who are, at worst, being a bit sloppy with their data management. When Trend blacklist an IP address due to a spamtrap hit from one of these customers the actions they are demanding before delisting seem out of proportion to the actual level of abuse seen – often requiring that the ESP terminate the customer or have the customer reconfirm the entire list.
“Reconfirming” means sending an opt-in challenge to every existing subscriber, and dropping any subscriber who doesn’t click on the confirmation link. It’s a very blunt tool. It will annoy the existing recipients and will usually lead to a lot of otherwise happy, engaged subscribers being removed from the mailing list. While reconfirmation can be a useful tool in cleaning up senders who have serious data integrity problems, it’s an overreaction in the case of a sender who doesn’t have any serious problems. “Proportionate punishment” issues aside, it often won’t do anything to improve the state of the email ecosystem. Rather than staying with their current ESP and doing some data hygiene work to fix their real problems, if any, they’re more likely to just move elsewhere. The ESP loses a customer, the sender keeps sending the same email.
If this were all that was going on, it would just mean that the MAPS blacklists are likely to block mail from senders who are sending mostly wanted email.
It’s worse than that, though.
The other thread is that we’re being told that Trend/MAPS are blocking IP addresses that only send confirmed, closed-loop opt-in email, due to spamtrap hits – and they’re not doing so accidentally, as they’re not removing those listings when told that those addresses only emit COI email. That’s something it’s hard to believe a serious blacklist would do, so we decided to dig down and look at what’s going on.
Trend/MAPS have registered upwards of 5,000 domains for use as spamtraps. Some of them are the sort of “fake” domain that people enter into a web form when they want a fake email address (“fakeaddressforyourlist.com”, “nonofyourbussiness.com”, “noneatall.com”). Some of them are the sort of domains that people will accidentally typo when entering an email address (“netvigattor.com”, “lettterbox.com”, “ahoo.es”). Some of them look like they were created automatically by flaky software or were taken from people obfuscating their email addresses to avoid spam (“notmenetvigator.com”, “nofuckinspamhotmail.com”, “nospamsprintnet.com”). And some are real domains that were used for real websites and email in the past, then acquired by Trend/MAPS (“networkembroidery.com”, “omeganetworking.com”, “sheratonforms.com”). And some are just inscrutable (“5b727e6575b89c827e8c9756076e9163.com” – it’s probably an MD5 hash of something, and is exactly the sort of domain you’d use when you wanted to be able to prove ownership after the fact, by knowing what it’s an MD5 hash of).
Some of these are good traps for detecting mail sent to old lists, but many of them (typos, fake addresses) are good traps for detecting mail sent to email addresses entered into web forms – in other words, for the sort of mail typically sent by opt-in mailers.
How are they listing sources of pure COI email, though? That’s simple – Trend/MAPS are taking email sent to the trap domains they own, then they’re clicking on the confirmation links in the email.
Yes. Really.
So if someone typos their email address in your signup form (“steve@netvigattor.com” instead of “steve@netvigator.com”) you’ll send a confirmation email to that address. Trend/MAPS will get that misdirected email, and may click on the confirmation link, and then you’ll “know” that it’s a legitimate, confirmed signup – because Trend/MAPS did confirm they wanted the email. Then at some later date, you’ll end up being blacklisted for sending that 100% COI email to a “MAPS spamtrap”. Then Trend/MAPS require you to reconfirm your entire list to get removed from their blacklist – despite the fact that it’s already COI email, and risking that Trend/MAPS may click on the confirmation links in that reconfirmation run, and blacklist you again based on the same “spamtrap hit” in the future.

A brief guide to spamtraps

“I thought spamtraps were addresses harvested off webpages.”

“I thought spamtraps were addresses that were valid and now aren’t.”

CAN SPAM and the first amendement

From Venkat at Eric Goldman’s blog we find the federal court has rejected an attempt to claim spam was “protected anonymous speech.”

Gmail abuse and postmaster addresses

A long time ago, Steve wrote a post about setting up abuse and postmaster addresses for Google hosted domains. Google has gone through a couple iterations of the interface since then, as you can see by the comment stream.
I checked with some people who have Google hosted domains and they have confirmed that abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses can be set up by creating a group. When you create the group you can then add yourself to the group and get the mail that comes into abuse@ and postmaster@.

The little things

It really amuses me when I get blatant spam coming from a network belonging to one of our Abacus customers. I know that the complaint will be handled appropriately.
It’s even better when the spam advertises the filter busting abilities of the spammer. I get a warm, fuzzy feeling to know that the spammer is going to be looking for a new host in the immediate future.

Patenting whitelisting, then suing people who use it

Thanks to Ken for pointing this one out.
A number of companies, including Surewest, AT&T, Cisco and Comcast are being sued by a company called BuyerLeverage for violating a pair of patents because they’re using Return Path as part of their mail filtering decisions.
I pulled the docs (1-11-cv-00645-LPS).
The patents all seem to center around a system where there is another layer between sender and recipient. The sender and recipient negotiate a deposit before email is delivered.
The oldest patent was filed in October 2001 (Patent 7,072,943).

Who's your market?

A great post by the always insightful Mark Brownlow. Why Value Matters
I initially posted this because I found his illustrations very amusing. But then I thought about a number of conversations I had last week. Many of us in the email marketing arena can’t think like our recipients. We just don’t.
I think, sometimes, our inability to see email except as marketing can hamper our ability to connect with users. We spend so much time analyzing email we don’t always remember that it’s a tool. That there is an actual person at the other end of the transaction.
Marketers measure email campaigns primarily by dollars. And maybe there’s no other way to measure them. But, I can’t help but think that maybe we’re missing something.
And I think Mark may have hit that particular bullseye.