spamcop

Ahh… SEO Spam

Part of my day job involves being the technical contact for their website, which means we get lots of offers from people offering to put us on the “first page of Google”.

Hmm, last time I checked, the first page of Google was, strangely, Google.  Somehow, I don’t think they outsource their SEO strategy to get there… they wrote the bloody code!

These emails go straight to Spamcop generally… and they send nastygrams to the people hosting the email servers they used.  In some cases, I’ve taken the extraordinary step of blocking frequently abused hosts.

# Block Centrilogic and SmartMailer because they don't act on spam reports.
-A INPUT -s 173.240.14.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 199.43.203.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
# Block OVH because they don't act on spam reports.
# List taken from https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=asn%3aAS16276&run=toolpage
-A INPUT -s 5.39.0.0/17 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 5.135.0.0/16 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 5.196.0.0/16 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.7.244.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.18.128.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.18.136.0/21 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.18.172.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.20.110.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.21.41.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.24.8.0/21 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.26.94.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.29.224.0/24 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.30.208.0/21 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
-A INPUT -s 8.33.96.0/21 -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
…

That is not an exhaustive list.  Sorry to people who use OVH for hosting and were trying to contact VRT/CETA legitimately, but OVH have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent with regard to management of network abuse.  Centrilogic/SmartMailer are more recent additions.

Of course, they keep trying, and thankfully, it takes longer for them to write the email than it does for me to deal with it. This doesn’t stop them claiming little gems like this:

Note: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind. If you are not interested then you can reply with a simple “NO”.

Errm, hate to disagree (actually no, in this case, I love disagreement)… but a few points:

  1. Your sending me an unsolicited content…
  2. … without my consent… (no listing in domain registration or scraping from a website is not consent)
  3. … that is advertising a paid-for service or otherwise something you’re hoping to make money from…
  4. … by electronic messaging.

That by definition is an Unsolicited Commercial Email… aka SPAM.  If you claim to be an Australian business, you better have a look at this.  If your ISP is complaining that you are abusing their services by sending spam, then perhaps you need to realise the people you are contacting are not interested!  You have your NO.