In November of last year, I noticed something interesting.

For the past three years, the #1 source of spam reaching my email inbox has been Salesforce, which bought out a bulk email provider called ExactTarget quite some time ago, and took off all the constraints. ExactTarget customers were, post-acquisition, permitted to spam, and the abuse team stopped enforcing anti-spam policies. Result: spammers flocked to SalesForce (hey, SalesForce needed to make back the $2,500,000,000 they spent on ExactTarget somehow!) and my inbox was flooded with crap.

Starting last November, however, the flood of crap from Salesforce dropped to second place. The new #1? An outfit called Mailchannels.

As near as I can tell, Mailchannels is now the preferred email delivery service of choice for the lowest of the low: scammers, people sending fake phish emails to steal passwords, romance and Nigerian prince fraud, you name it.

Over the past few weeks, 46 of the 48 phish emails I have received (95.8%) came through Mailchannels. 100% of the Nigerian prince scam emails I’ve received? Mailchannels. 100% of the romance scam I’ve received? Mailchannels. 92% of the spam overall? Mailchannels.

I took a screenshot of the Mailchannels emails I’ve received a while back, and the results are rather grim:

Wow, that’s a lot of scam, fraud, and phish emails! With percentages like that, Mailchannels must be so proud.

There’s a particularly delicious irony here. See the highlighted entry at the bottom, the one in blue? I have been reporting all the spam emails to Mailchannels. That is a bounce email, when I reported a computer virus I received through Mailchannels. It bounced.

In other words:

Mailchannels knew the email was malware. They sent it to me anyway, but refused to accept it themselves.

Which really tells you everything you need to know about this organization.

What is Mailchannels?

Mailchannels is an “email delivery company.” In English: You pay them money, you send an email to hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of email addresses, and they do everything in their power to make sure your emails don’t get flagged as spam.

A list of their services includes:

• Sending emails from “clean” IP addresses not in any spam blocklists.
• Switching the servers an email comes from should emails start getting flagged as spam
• Using scalable cloud servers to send vast quantities of emails

In other words, if you’re sending Nigerian scam or romance scam or password phish emails, which have a very low rate of return, a service like Mailchannels is exactly what you want.

How do they respond to spam reports?

Ah HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

I’ve sent hundreds (literally) of spam reports to Mailchannels. Every single one received the same reply:

From: Swathi Karun <skarun@mailchannels.com> Re: Spam Hi, Thank you for contacting MailChannels support. I have taken necessary action against the reported abuse activity. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

And the spam still rolls in. Every day, often from the same spammer with the same content. They don’t even block phishers who send identical phish emails through their servers over and over again.

It cannot possibly be more clear: Mailchannels is a bulletproof spam service provider, that through deliberate action or negligence permits their service to be used by the lowest criminals on the Internet.

What can you do?

Mailchannels doesn’t care. They know they’re in the spam business; they make money from delivering phish and scam emails. They don’t accept spam reports from spam-fighting services like Spamcop.

And repeated emails to Mailchannels abuse doesn’t do anything. There’s one email phisher in particular who sends out fake emails to Dreamhost customers, trying to steal their webhosting passwords; I’ve received more than two dozen of these phish emails from this same phisher through Mailchannels, reported every one, and they keep rolling in.

Fortunately, emails from Mailchannels are easy to spot. If you view the headers, you’ll always find a line like this near the top:

I strongly recommend setting up an email filter using your email program. If the headers contain the word “Mailchannels,” auto-delete the email. Your inbox will thank you.