Clickback MAIL has been hitting spam trap with email addresses which have been dead for a very long time (i.e. years) or never valid in any decade. Probably because Clickback doesn’t require pesky things like “Opt-In” or “Confirmed” subscribers but do allow purchased lists and “cold” contacts to be mailed. Seriously this is bad behavior, I wonder why no one has just blacklisted all of Clickback IPs/domains yet?
Below is another example of B2B spam sent by a large, legitimate company, this time by Oracle. This spam was sent to a pristine spamtrap that follows the format of normal email addresses at the company in question, but does not actually belong to the person that received the spam. Unlike the IBM B2B prospecting spam I reported a few days ago, Oracle sent this spam from its ESP, the Oracle Marketing Cloud.
NOTE [5/19/2017]: An Oracle representative notified me that the IP address that sent the spam is NOT part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, although that IP belongs to Oracle.
This week two fellow antispam activists, one of whom has been active in the field for over 20 years, reported receiving spam from the same IBM employee about the IBM Watson platform. One of the spams was sent to the business email address of the recipient. The other was sent to a pristine spamtrap that follows the formats usually used for email addresses at the company, but has never actually been used by the intended recipient. The spams were not sent through the IBM Watson Marketing Cloud (formerly SilverPop), but from its corporate mailservers.
Verizon, one of the largest telecommunication companies in America, has sent email to several of my spamtraps in the past few weeks. These emails solicit the business of companies that are not associated with those spamtraps, but whose company names might plausibly belong to the email addresses that received the spam. No ESP was involved; Verizon sent this email from their own IPs.
U.S.-based retailer Target, which recently suffered a massive data breach, has responded to that breach by hiring an email appender to append scraped email addresses (some of them closed for over a decade) to their customer list. Target then spammed that appended list over the past few days. The ESP is Epsilon, via its subsidiary Bigfoot Interactive.