Catch More Spam with Zombies

Zombie email addresses are once-valid addresses which have been literally abandoned by their users, yet remain on marketers’ subscriber lists more or less forever. Spam trap operators we spoke to all agreed that it’s best if the address or domain reject all mail for a period of months or (preferably) years before being recycled as a spam trap.

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A new and improved Sender Score for a new year

As 2010 begins and many head to the gym to fulfill New Year’s resolutions, here at Return Path we’ll be getting our workout strengthening our data! As the world’s most comprehensive email reputation data source (collecting data from over 150 million mailboxes worldwide), we are dedicated to ensuring our reputation scores are accurate, current and thorough.

We know the email universe relies on our Sender Score. For anyone who sends email, it’s the foremost measure of email reputation – a direct reflection on sending practices based on universal reputation metrics: user complaints, spam trap hits, unknown user counts, and more. For those receiving mail, Sender Score can be used to inform inbound email handling and assist with the Herculean task of separating good email from spam.

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An Unwelcome Afterlife for a Long-Dead Blacklist

There’s still a few weeks before Halloween, but have we ever got a scary story for you — and every word of it is true. (Imagine we’re sitting around a campfire, chowing down on s’mores, flashlights under our faces.)

Seven years ago, on this very internet, there was a man named Matthew who was angry about spam. Now sure, there are lots of people angry about spam, and some of them are named Matthew, but this particular Matthew decided that he was going to do something about it.

Matthew noticed that a lot of spam came from foreign countries, and that he didn’t get any real mail from people who lived there. So he created blacklists for each country that sent him spam. Then he noticed that a lot of spam came from particular large ISPs, and he created blacklists for each ISP that sent him spam. Soon Matthew had a lot of lists, and some of them were very big.

Five years passed, and suddenly Matthew and his lists disappeared! …

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MAAWG Consumer Survey: Deeper in the Data

This week, MAAWG published A Look at Consumers’ Awareness of Email Security and Practices (available from maawg.org.) This research paper is based on a survey of real email users — just like our friends, spouses, grandparents, children — the actual humans who use email and don’t want to have to understand the technical or social underpinnings. It was not a survey of MAAWG members, or conducted by MAAWG members; the intent was to get a true picture. In conversations between senders and ISPs, often with Return Path helping to facilitate, everyone’s always trying to figure out what recipients do or don’t want; finally, this survey gives us some answers.

To read the press and blog response, it sounds like they’ve concluded that spam is a complete success and everyone should start spamming to get rich — but at Return Path we rely on the data, and the data tells a much richer story than a 140-character Twitter paraphrase of the press release ever could.

First, one very humbling realization for all of us …

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If You’re Going to Read One Academic Anti-Spam Paper this Year ….

I have a difficult admission to make: I read a fair number of academic anti-spam papers.  We are constantly on the hunt for ideas that can make the reputation systems that Return Path runs a little bit better.  There are a lot of people doing some really clever stuff out there.  There are a lot of people who are sure that they have the “Final, Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem” (FUSSP) which only requires everyone to change how they handle mail.   Rarely, however, have I been as impressed with an anti-spam paper as “Spamlytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion” by a group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Diego.  More than anything, I love the audacity of their project.   

A brief summary of the project …

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AOL’s Plans for Domain Reputation

With every new technology, there are a few people who fully grok not only where it stands now, but where it’s going — who will be using it, and how. In our case, these are people whose thinking about reputation is so far ahead of the rest of the industry that if we would have had them as speakers at our IN conference a few weeks ago, and they revealed their visions of the future, everyone’s heads would have exploded!

One of these is my friend Mike Adkins, who works on authentication and reputation for AOL. AOL has always been a leader in the industry, and Mike and I — along with Dave Crocker, and other smart folks — have been talking about the inevitable and much-needed intersection of authentication and reputation at MAAWG for the past few years. One of the recurring difficulties with this or any complex new technology is that it’s new: there are no existing “best practices” and everyone is worried about making the first mistakes. Mike’s fed up with this — as are we all — and he has decided to put a sharp wooden stake into the heart of the problem. Recently, he’s been talking very candidly with the industry about AOL’s future plans. The plans may change, he says, but this is their starting point — and anyone who wants to continue sending mail to AOL’s subscribers, or to understand the direction the rest of the industry is likely to take, needs to pay attention.

I tend to get overly wordy and perhaps somewhat theoretical when talking about this topic, so Return Path’s marketing team has condensed what we understand of AOL’s plan into a few simple bullet points …

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Eighty Percent of Email is Being Sent From Illegitimate or Unknown Mail Servers According To Return Path’s Reputation Benchmark Report

Commercial Mailers With Low Unknown User Rates and No Spam Trap Hits Have Delivery Rate Increases of More Than 20 Points

NEW YORK & DENVER–Eighty percent of email is being sent from illegitimate or unknown mail servers, Return Path discovered with its new Return Path Reputation Benchmark Report. Return Path found that forty-six percent of email is being sent from hosts that should not be sending email at all – compromised hosts, dynamic IP addresses, and other non-mail servers. In addition, 34% of email is sent from “unknown” IPs which are not classifiable by available data.

Return Path conducted the Reputation Benchmark study by examining a sample of 2.3 million IPs pulled from the Return Path Reputation Data Network – a cooperative data network that collects and analyzes email data from more than 20 ISPs and other data providers representing more than 100 million mailboxes.

For the study, Return Path removed the data from servers that do not have reverse DNS and are clearly not supposed to be sending email. If you factor in the 35% of servers with no reverse DNS, the “bad” mail hosts goes even higher …

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Trust in Email Begins with Authentication

Unfortunately, forging From: or other commonly seen email headers is trivially easy. It’s one of the most frustrating oversights in the creation of internet email technology — though of course that’s only obvious in hindsight; it was just fine for the pre-internet networks of the late 1970s and early-mid 1980s.

Since then, things have changed — and the most interesting recent technological advancements in email have been in the realm of sender authentication, which encompasses ways to verify that the apparent sender of a message actually is the entity which sent it. Before you can answer the question “can I trust this message?,” you first have to ask “who sent it?” — but before authentication, there was often no way to know for sure.

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Why Does Return Path Spend So Much Time Working Within Industry Organizations?

That answer is simple. Because we love email and are committed to preserving and enriching the email ecosystem for everyone who uses it (except the bad guys.) There is a lot of coordination required if senders, receivers, and end users are to withstand the assault on email by the “axis of evil” – spammers, phishers, and other fraudsters that are polluting our email ecosystem. As champions of the email space, we have dedicated a lot of time and energy into supporting the online community and committing resources to making email work for everyone.

Return Path is proud to serve in the following capacities:

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