On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 14:04 -0400, Michael Scheidell wrote: > main sleaze, as in spam from larger, established, 'legit' companies. I > am seeing a 20% increase in spam that doesn't trigger any of the zombie, > forged, gappy or dialup list rules. Neither are they triggering SARES > or SOUGHT rules. > > Looks like with the global downturn, many companies are turning to > 'free' email marketing services to not only cut down on costs of > marketing, but to more quickly get the message out. Many more third > party email marketing companies are allowing questionable mailing lists > and are opting to keep the money and client rather then enforce their > posted terms of service. > > Traditional outbound marketing would require people to make cold calls, > postcards or mailers send via snail mail. To reach 10,000 people via > cold call would take 100 people 10 days (well, they would 'reach' 1% of > them). > > Postcards, US third class could take three weeks and cost around $1.00 each. > > Main sleaze: as in DKIM SIGNED, NOT FORGED, SPF RECORDS MATCH, some > with and some without knowledge and adherence to the US Federal CAN-SPAM > laws. > > Traditional SA methods of looking for forged headers, zombies, and > dialup networks doesn't help much. Neither does Bayesian filtering > since most of this new main sleaze spam is targeting the customers > vertical market anyway. Hardly any 'zombie/forged/trojan' originated > email ever gets past. These are actually very easy to identify. > > Some blacklists and reputation filters help, but this is reactive, after > the fact, and usually after the company in question has finished their > spam runs. These emails are not using any evasion tricks, and are > usually directly send to one contact at a time with full username/email > address. > > (Even had one yesterday from a competitor in the anti-spam market: > spammed us trying to sell their anti-virus client software :-). > > Yes, our marketing and sales people beat us up about using these above > methods in our marketing, and even uploaded a 'questionable' list of > email addresses to one of our listservers. The temptation is great to > (ab)use email in this fashion. > > Maybe I am stuck in 1994 when (most) people respected the net. Maybe I > react badly when one of these main-sleaze emails makes it past our > filters, but the good news is that they help us identify third party > email marketing companies that aren't careful about their clients. > > What are you seeing? more main-sleaze spam, directly targeting your > company/ vertical market or clients? or aren't you seeing much of this?
Let me introduce you to the Barracuda White List & emailreg.org..... Oh. I see you may have already met them :-)
