Jump to:

• Introduction
• The Growing Spam Problem in Web Hosting
• How Web Hosts Resolve Ip Reputation Issues
• What It Costs
• Analysis: Calculating the cost of a Spamhaus SBL blocklisting

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Introduction

Web and email hosting providers without automated outbound spam control are at risk of incurring excessive costs. Spammers compromise provider services, leading to reduced IP reputation and problems delivering email. In this whitepaper, we analyze and explain these hidden costs.

The Growing Spam Problem in Web Hosting

Spammers constantly seek new ways to deliver to their mailing lists. Recently, spammers have increased their use of compromised accounts, servers, and scripts to send spam. In 2012, this type of compromise increased dramatically, as spammers switched from bot-net spamming to the abuse of more reliable and scalable hosting resources (see Figure 1).

IP reputation services like Spamhaus keep track of abusive IPs. When spam is sent from a web or email hosting machine, that machine attains a negative IP reputation and can no longer reliably deliver email to the Internet. In especially severe cases, a provider’s entire network is blocked.  

Figure 1 - Graph showing the dramatic increase in spam originating from hosting providers. The graph summarizes the average number of unique domains originating from each IP tracked by ReturnPath’s services. This trend is indicative of the shift from bot spamming (lots of IPs with a few domains per IP) to compromised account spamming (fewer IPs, but with more domains per IP)

How Web Hosts Resolve IP Reputation Issues

What providers do today

Step 1: Discovering the problem

... [Download the white paper to read more]

What It Costs

... [Download the white paper to read more]

Analysis: Calculating the cost of a Spamhaus SBL blocklisting

... [Download the white paper to read more]