New Spam Trick - Spoofing Newsletters

If there's any evidence that filters are growing in popularity and effectiveness - it's that spammers are having to adapt.

Messages sent with standard "unsubscribe" notices, are loaded with links, images and sent from non-existent domains are getting blocked pretty consistently. Sometimes this happens server-side, and sometimes it's picked up by Outlook's (relatively poor) built-in filter. More and more often, they're detected and deleted by a dedicated anti-spam filter program like SpamButcher.

One way or the other, spam senders have to reach deeper and deeper into their bag of tricks if they want a reasonable percentage of their email delivered. I have to say, their latest approach is pretty slick.

All filtering systems suffer from a certain percentage of false-positives. This is especially true when it comes to email newsletters. To have your email newsletter reliably delivered, it's pretty critical to have the recipients "whitelist" your address ahead of time.

So, spammers are now spoofing legit newsletters in an effort to bypass filters. They're betting that software tools are prone to recognize some of the most popular newsletters, and ignore them. Some of the really popular newsletters are already listed in a certain percentage of user's whitelists - causing them to be ignored by filters altogether.

Above simple deliverability issues, the impact of the stealth-spam on a user's purchasing decisions is potentially huge. If an apparently legitimate email newsletter, "reviews" a product - and refers the reader to a website - one could only speculate they'd be much more prone to follow the advice than if they believed it to be unsolicited.

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