Download - Bulk Mailers
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Bulk mailers
Atomic email studio is a multifunctional bulk mailer capable of managing all aspects of a
spam campaign. It has features that allow the user to create, send, manage mailing lists and
harvest email addresses. As shown in the diagram above the software allows for the
extraction of email addresss from a variety of source websites, files, whois databases,
newsgroups, bowsers and the option to purchase email addresses.
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In the diagram above program is given two websites on which to conduct a search the first is
University of Westminster at addresswww.wmin.ac.uk and a total of two email addressed
are acquired one is [email protected] and is located at the following URL
http://www.wmin.ac.uk and the other [email protected] is located at the
following URL http://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-33. A total of 51 web pages were searched
inorder to get the two email addresses. The second search or harvest was conducted at the
British broadcasting corporation website atwww.bbc.co.uk and a total of 10 email address
were collected with associated URLs. As the program examines the web pages for email
addresses it shows the number of web pages that it has examined and the ones that it still has
yet to examine, as shown in the diagram above at the botton left it has examined 722 pages
but still has 5722 pages left to examine.However after a short period of time the number of
pages still to be examined increased from 5722 to 7206 and also the number of email
addresses increased. Therefore it seems that more email webpages are being searched the
more websites are found within the links.
http://www.wmin.ac.uk/http://www.wmin.ac.uk/http://www.wmin.ac.uk/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-33http://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-33http://www.bbc.co.uk/http://www.bbc.co.uk/http://www.bbc.co.uk/http://www.bbc.co.uk/http://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-33mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.wmin.ac.uk/ -
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When attemping to export the emails that have been harvested and send a mass email. The
researcher is prompted to purchase the software.Therefore the harvested emails couldnt be
exported using the trial version of the software.
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Inorder to send emails using the software account creation was required which included the
user name, email address and company name. These were the intitial steps in configuring the
account to send mail.
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Since the program did not allow for any of the harvested emails to be saved. The researcher
had to use email addresses derived from his own personal contact list. The emails used to test
the sending capabilities of the program can be seen in the diagram above.
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Ir
The next option that is presented is the SMTP server selection. It allows emails sent by the
program to use an external SMTP server or to sent the mail directly to the recepients email
server bypassing the ISP. The difference is that ISPs usually impose restrictions on the
amount of mail that can be sent to one user. Therefore if the mail is set directly using the
internal SMTP it can bypass those restrictions.
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Email tracking was enabled inorder to monitor the progress of the emai campaign also to
observe the effectiveness of the email tracking feature. An email address and password was
required inorder for the tracking report to be sent to designated email account. However the
email tracking was not succesful as error message was shown when attempts to intitiate it
were made.
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The copy of the test email that was sent.
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All of the 22 emails are sent. However three emails were successfully sent which were all
Gmail accounts, two were invalid email addresses and seventeen had send error. The rest of
the email address had send error more likely to the fact that there are being blocked by
service providers due to the fact that there use and internal SMTP.
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The sent message has been received in the users mailbox.However it has been received in
the user spam folder. Which can more likely be attributed to the fact that the mail was sent by
an internal SMTP.
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Delivered-To: [email protected]: by 10.229.227.21 with SMTP id iy21cs42627qcb;
Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:38:36 -0700 (PDT)Received: by 10.213.101.17 with SMTP id a17mr425477ebo.32.1284136715534;
Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:38:35 -0700 (PDT)Return-Path:
Received: from PHIL-01 (cpc2-finc7-0-0-cust220.4-2.cable.virginmedia.com[81.97.220.221])by mx.google.com with ESMTP id
v8si5911827eeh.26.2010.09.10.09.38.34;Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:38:35 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of [email protected] does not designate 81.97.220.221 as permittedsender) client-ip=81.97.220.221;Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=softfail (google.com: domain oftransitioning [email protected] does not designate 81.97.220.221 aspermitted sender) [email protected]: From: "Deputy Dog"
Subject: New messageTo: "p.mapfumo" Content-Type: multipart/alternative;boundary="PcnLhswJ2YuB7x1uJ89IBE5CFJWQpm5=_G"MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitOrganization: The Dog PoundDate: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:38:22 +0100
This is a multi-part message in MIME format
--PcnLhswJ2YuB7x1uJ89IBE5CFJWQpm5=_GContent-Type: text/plain ; charset="iso-8859-1"Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Dear Sir/MadamThe page that you are looking for cannot be found.
But how about a game of Global Thermo Nuclear?=20Or go to joke.com homepage?Regards(Director of operations)
Deputy Dog Junior
Sent by trial version of Atomic Mail Sender
--PcnLhswJ2YuB7x1uJ89IBE5CFJWQpm5=_GContent-Type: text/html ; charset="iso-8859-1"Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Dear Sir/Madam
Thepage that you are looking for cannot be found.=
But how about a game of Global Thermo Nuclear?
Or go to joke.com homepage?
Regards
(Director of operations)
Deputy Dog Junior
Sent by trial version of Atomic = -
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Mail Sender
--PcnLhswJ2YuB7x1uJ89IBE5CFJWQpm5=_G--
The header information from the received emails shos that the receiving server has identified
the fact that the domain name used in the email address field did not originate from that
particular users domain it claims it was sent from.
Results from bulkmailer
The experiment that was conducted on the bulkmailers show that there are;
Bulkmailer vendors are aware of restrictions that are imposed on the number of emailthat can be sent at any one time and therefore have provided a means to bypass the
ISP by sending mail thorough an internal SMTP. This is view is also supported by
Cournane and Hunt (2003).
Vendors of bulkmailers have also developed software that the capable of sendingmass emails as well as harvesting them this demostrated by the Atomic mail tool that
was tested for this experiment. This view is also supported by a study on spam tools
conducted by Stern (2008)
Even though the trial versions of bulkmailers have limitations there provide a meansof testing the software to assess its abilitie. However since the tools fuctionality was
restricted it was difficult to access whether its ability to manipulate header
information.Which is has been reported to be possible in a study conducted by
Cournane and Hunt (2003).
The tracking ability of the software could not be assessed even though numberousattempts were made to reconfigure it. Even though the tracking abilities could not be
accessed there is evidence that some of the tools analysed have this ability allowing to
track the success of the spamming campaigns.
Only Google email accounts were the only accounts that accepted emails from thebulkmailer but all the other email service providers rejected all mail sent from the
bulkmailers.The email that was received in the resaerchers Google account revealed
that the Googles email filters detected that the email did not originate from the email
address that it claimed it origined from. This suggests that Google mail is willing to
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accept email even if it suspects some form of fradulent behaviour, whilst other email
service providers reject suspect emails.
Bulkmailers abilites to personalise mail, text and HTML support, and messageobfusication techique to invade detection were not investigated in this experiment due
to time constraits and restrictions applied to the evaluation version of the software
used. However some of the sofware vendors offered mailing lists that could be
purchased, which brings the researcher to question whether the email addresses for
sale were obtained in an ethical manner. This seems probable as the software vendors
made not attempts to warn against the dangers of spamming and violating spam laws.
This experiment has demostrated the functionality of the bulkmailers to send mass
mail and also their crawling abilities, therefore this suggests that even if botnets send
the majority of spam there are automated tools disguised as marketing tools that are
also responsible for sending spam by private individuals who maybe or not involved
in criminal activities. There are also bulkmailers and crawling tools that are mainly
used by professional spammers such as Send safe,Reactor mailer and Darker mailer
that the reseacher was not able to get hold of due to fact that some of them are known
to contain malicious software and there are very expensive.
.