Snowshoe spamming

Like a snowshoe spreads the load of a traveler across a wide area of snow, snowshoe spamming is a technique used by spammers to spread spam output across many IPs and domains, in order to dilute reputation metrics and evade filters. Snowshoers use many fictitious business names (DBA - Doing Business As), fake names and identities, and frequently changing postal dropboxes and voicemail drops. Conversely, legitimate mailers try hard to build brand reputation based on a real business address, a known domain and a small, permanent, well-identified range of sending IPs. Snowshoers often use anonymized or unidentifiable whois records, whereas legitimate senders are proud to provide their bona fide identity. Some showshoers use tunneled connections from their back-end spam cannon to the spam egress IP. The back-end IP address is not in the spam headers. ISPs, you are in a position to detect those back-end spam cannons by checking where traffic flows are coming from. Remember, the tunneled connection is not necessarily on port 25. Spamhaus always appreciates such information.

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