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Amazon Bulk-Email Service Could Lure Spammers
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.'"
In their docs, they mentioned something about working with other Major ISPs. From what they indicated, other ISPs (Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc) track metrics on emails - people who click them as "spam", "objectional", etc. These ISPs forward this information back to Amazon. If they detect that someone is sending out mail which is being flagged as objectional by too many users, they can shut you down.
Those assurances aren't entirely heartening, though, unless Amazon is way ahead of the curve with content-filtering technology.
Amazon has the spammer's credit card details, knows where each email comes from, and can freeze or terminate accounts at the touch of a button (or via an algorithm). This gives it a considerable advantage over those that have to passively filter spam.
And in any case, spam filters are pretty damn good these days. I've had a public email address for going on 15 years, which used to get hundreds of spam emails every day. Now it's very rare for even one to slip past GMail's filter.
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.