MainSleaze

Clothing and accessories retailer As We Change, whose target market is “women over 40”, is sending bulk email to an email address that belonged to a single man before it was closed in 2007. After looking through this seller’s catalog, I seriously doubt that anything in it would have been of interest to the previous owner of this spamtrap. 😉 The ESP is E-Dialog.

The email is a “please come back” type of message, so the usual excuse for a spamtrap being on a list — a customer mistypes a subscription email address and the seller fails to confirm web site subscriptions (which is foolish) — appears unlikely. Because this email address belonged to a man back when it was live, it also appears unlikely that this is a very old list. Since a first name is used in the email, I suspect that As We Change either purchased a list or had a company perform e-pending on an existing customer list. E-pending is not just opt-out (and therefore spam by definition), but also has unreliable results, as this spamtrap hit illustrates.

Sending IP: 208.94.23.130

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from mileskimball.outbound.ed10.com (mileskimball.outbound.ed10.com [208.94.23.130])
        by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
        for <xxx>; Mon, 14 Nov 2011 <xxx> -0600 (CST)
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
Received: from [127.0.0.1] ([127.0.0.1:<xxx>])
        by <xxx>.e-dialog.com (envelope-from <<xxx>@mileskimball.bounce.ed10.net>)
        (ecelerity 2.2.2.45 r(<xxx>)) with ECSTREAM
        id <xxx>; Mon, 14 Nov 2011 <xxx> -0500
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:xx:xx -0500
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="<xxx>"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: "As We Change" <Aswechange@em.aswechange.com>
Reply-To: "As We Change" <Aswechange.<xxx>@em.aswechange.com>
To: <xxx>
Subject: We've Missed You! Please Enjoy FREE Shipping and 15% Off...
Message-Id: <<xxx>@e-dialog.com>
X-Mail-From: <xxx>@mileskimball.bounce.ed10.net
X-Match: mileskimball.bounce.ed10.net
X-RCPT-To: <xxx>
X-Mailer: EDMAIL R6.00.02

Readable Email:

From: As We Change <Aswechange@em.aswechange.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: We’ve Missed You! Please Enjoy FREE Shipping and 15% Off…
Reply-To: As We Change <Aswechange.<xxx>@em.aswechange.com>

<E-pended name deleted>, We’ve Missed You! Please Enjoy FREE Shipping and 15% Off. Don’t miss this exciting email from As We Change. Please enable images, or view this in a Web browser
http://link.aswechange.com/<xxx>

This email was sent to you because you asked to receive updates and promotions from As We Change.

If you would like to unsubscribe from receiving emails like this in the future, click here:
http://link.aswechange.com/<xxx>

As We Change, 250 City Center, Oshkosh, WI 54901