[GTALUG] Mailchannels Vancouver,BC

[ac]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2023 10:15:33 -0400 (EDT)
"D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> | From: ac via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
> | It seems that Mailchannels no longer manages abuse, spam, scams and
> | criminal activity and seems to have become a service provider to
> | criminal syndicates and other low life, nefarious and scum baggerry
> | (does scum baggerry have two G's and two R's?  or is scum baggery
> even | a word?) 
> 
> I had never heard of them. <https://www.mailchannels.com/>
> 

surprisingly, they have grown to be quite huge. Among their 'legit'
clients are A2 (USA) and MelbourneIT (AU) and, well many many others,
even clients from the dark(er) and very dingy corners of the planet.

the staff are extremely friendly though, they always are "shocked" at
the abuse and they are always so extremely sorry. They always promise
and pledge on the lives of their grand children to take action and to
block/stop their scammer/spammer/whatever

yet, time and time again, the exact same scammer/spammer a few
months,year or two later, using the same "auth user" as per the email
headers, again sends similar or the same scam/spam/whatever...

some of the scammers are clearly scammers as they use fake domains,
something like paytheusgov.com (used as an example.com as it is not
registered atm)

> It seems that they claim to let a client outsource mail handling for a
> web-site.
> - they filter inbound SPAM (to your site)
> - they don't seem to claim to filter outbound SPAM from your site.
>   Looking deeper, they seem to do this if they think that one of
>   your accounts has been compromised.
> Nothing suggests that they vet their customers.
> I take it you know that they are knowingly accepting Bad Guys as
> client and that this is new.

probably more like they suspect it is a client that will abuse their
systems or even has abused their resources in the past but take the $$
and look the other way anyway. On the other hand, what you said may
also be accurate as some of the domain names relaying through their
services are quite obviously phishing names, so reasonably, they do
have to "know" (or at the very least, strongly suspect...)

With the two largest email realyers now starting to take abuse more
seriously (both Microsoft and Google seem to be actually really
managing their abuse atm) - I cannot help but wonder if this means that
this cycle of growth for less ethical orgs are moving to a close?

Andre