My collection of spam and the spread of SMTP TLS

September 15, 2014

One of the things that my sinkhole SMTP server does that's new on my workstation is that it supports TLS, unlike my old real mail server there (which dates from a very, very long time ago). This has given me the chance to see how much of my incoming spam is delivered with TLS, which in turn has sparked some thoughts about the spread of SMTP TLS.

The starting point is that a surprising amount of my incoming spam is actually delivered with TLS; right now about 30% of the successful deliveries have used TLS. This is somewhat more striking than it sounds for two reasons; first, the Go TLS code I'm relying on for TLS is incomplete (and thus not all TLS-capable sending MTAs can actually do TLS with it), and second a certain amount of the TLS connection attempts fail because the sending MTA is offering an invalid client certificate.

(I also see a fair number of rejected delivery attempts in my SMTP command log that did negotiate TLS, but the stats there are somewhat tangled and I'm not going to try to summarize them.)

While there are some persistent spammers, most of the incoming email is your typical advance fee fraud and phish spam that's send through various sorts of compromised places. Much of the TLS email I get is this boring sort of spam, somewhat to my surprise. My prejudice is that a fair amount of this spam comes from old and neglected machines, which are exactly the machines that I would expect are least likely to do TLS.

(Some amount of such spam comes from compromised accounts at places like universities, which can and do happen to even modern and well run MTAs. I'm not surprised when they use TLS.)

What this says to me is that support for initiating TLS is fairly widespread in MTAs, even relatively old MTAs, and fairly well used. This is good news (it's now clear that pervasive encryption of traffic on the Internet is a good thing, even casual opportunistic encryption). I suspect that it's happened because common MTAs have enabled client TLS by default and the reason they've been able to do that is that it basically takes no configuration and almost always works.

(It's clear that at least some client MTAs take note when STARTTLS fails and don't try it again even if the server MTA offers it to them, because I see exactly this pattern in my SMTP logs from some clients.)

PS: you might wonder if persistent spammers use TLS when delivering their spam. I haven't done a systematic measurement for various reasons but on anecdotal spot checks it appears that my collection of them basically doesn't use TLS. This is probably unsurprising since TLS does take some extra work and CPU. I suspect that spammers may start switching if TLS becomes something that spam filtering systems use as a trust signal, just as some of them have started advertising DKIM signatures.

Written on 15 September 2014.
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Last modified: Mon Sep 15 23:25:16 2014
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