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Amazon Bulk-Email Service Could Lure Spammers

Posted by timothy on from the penny-for-your-thoughts-on-sexual-enhancement dept.

snydeq writes "Amazon Simple Email Service and Amazon Web Services look to be a potent combination for businesses and developers, no matter which side of the law they're on, InfoWorld reports. The newly announced bulk email service, which will enable Amazon customers to send 100 emails for a penny, could prove enticing to those seeking a cheap way to bombard inboxes with spam, malware, and phishing lures. Amazon claims its in-house content filtering technology should assuage anyone thinking SES will be used by scammers. 'Those assurances aren't entirely heartening, though, unless Amazon is way ahead of the curve with content-filtering technology. Email services and software vendors have tried for years to keep spam and other unwanted messages from showing up in users' viewing pane, but the crud keeps slipping through.'"

3 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whoa! by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    By definition, isn't this spam?

    Not necessarily. I think Amazon is marketing this technology mostly for bacn usage.

    --
    My blog
  2. Spammers cannot afford $0.10 per 1000 emails by TimFreeman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The response rate for spam is very low (1 in 12.5 million according to http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/spammers-get-1-response-to-12-500-000-emails-483381?src=rss&attr=all), so a spammer would have to pay 12.5M / 1K * $0.10 = $1,250 to get a response by paying Amazon to send emails. Multiple responses will be required to make a sale. If they can't make $1,250 of profit per response, they can't make money by using Amazon to send their spam.

  3. Amazon Cloud network ranges to blacklist by Arrogant-Bastard · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Several of these have already been emitting spam for a while; whatever Amazon's doing (presuming that they're actually doing ANYTHING beyond having their spokespeople lie about it) isn't working.

    50.16.0.0/14
    67.202.0.0/18
    72.44.32.0/19
    75.101.128.0/17
    174.129.0.0/16
    184.72.0.0/15
    204.236.128.0/17
    216.182.224.0/20

    Mail from these ranges should probably be refused, or, at minimum, subjected to heightened scrutiny.