Here is a logfile section from a piece of hosted mass-mailing software. It’s unprotected currently (otherwise I’d have shown you more) and it would appear that anyone can submit it a job to be spammed at around 300,000 addresses per minute. The topics covered by this mailer’s log are quite varied, poetry competitions to PS/3s and advertising solutions for dating leading obviously to debt four days later.

As you can see from the dates, this one has been about for a while.

The server is also running a commercial mailer software with click-tracking abilities on a separate port that is no doubt blocked by almost all corporate networks, so we assume that they are focused on the consumer-at-home demographic. This is undoubtedly a small-time operation in comparison to the usual suspects we discuss. They are sending to smaller and more targeted lists and are probably a lot closer to the thin-blue-line definition of spam, too.

It’s not uncommon for us to study the contents of bulk-mailing tools for tell-tale traits in the style of the mail it sends–making it trivial to repute the tool’s behaviour independently of the content. Leaving the tools open to the world this time was a very nice gesture, though.