Feb
24

January 2015 ESP Spam: Some Notes….

I see that Atro Tossavainen graphed the spam that we saw in January. Atro and I manage a substantial spamtrap collection together, so I have seen what he posted about. Nothing there surprised me except the hugely disproportionate amount of spam Topica sends to our spamtraps. I’ve blogged twice about Topica, and in the last blog recommended blocking their /22 because of the amounts of spam and probability that little or no non-spam email is sent from them any more. However, I did not realize that we were seeing twice as much spam from Topica as from ExactTarget, which sends several orders of magnitude more email than they do.

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Feb
23

January 2015 in spamtraps: ESPs

Here’s how the various email service providers (ESPs) rated on our “hitting spamtraps” scale in January 2015:

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Feb
14

International Sales Group: Selling High-End Real Estate to Bankrupt Real Estate Firms?

Florida-based real estate sales firm International Sales Group (ISG) is emailing a list that contains almost a dozen of my spamtraps. Most of those spamtraps were email addresses at real estate firms that went bankrupt between 2008 and 2011. ISG is either emailing a list that they have not contacted in years, or they bought a list or hired an email appender. Their ESP is Vertical Response, whose abuse department appears to have gone AWOL sometime in 2014.

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Jan
29

Ahern and Associates: ONCE AGAIN Spamming a Purchased or Email Appended List

Transportation management consulting company Ahern & Associates, which appeared on the Mainsleaze blog once already, is emailing a large number of spamtraps, at least a half dozen of which are non-typoed pristine spamtraps. This time, they are emailing through ESP Vertical Response, which has been completely unresponsive to spam complaints for the past few months.

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Jan
19

Knowledge Hub Networks: Spamming a Pristine Spamtrap

Longtime spamming company Knowledge Hub Networks emailed a non-typoed pristine spamtrap today. I would not normally blog about such a company on the Mainsleaze Spam blog, because in my view a company whose sole means of obtaining business is spamming purchased and email appended lists does not meet the criterion of “an otherwise legitimate company”. However, these days they are spamming through a legitimate ESP — Vertical Response.

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Jan
18

Coldwater Creek: Spamming a Purchased or Email Appended List

Today clothing retailer Coldwater Creek emailed about a dozen spamtraps with a sales announcement. About a third of those spamtraps were probable typos. Several others were repurposed spamtraps, some of them not live for well over a decade. One was a pristine spamtrap at a domain that has never had a legitimate email address. The ESP was the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SMC), previously known of as ExactTarget.

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Jan
09

Finnair: Massive failure in personal data processing

During the evening (Finnish time, UTC+0200) of January 8, 2015, Finland’s national airline, Finnair (www, biz reg) launched an unprecedented email advertising campaign at their valued customer list.

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Nov
26

Regus Management (Finland) Oy spamming

A relatively recently formed business, Regus Management (Finland) Oy (biz reg) is using spam to fictitious personal data to advertise their wares. The spam service provider is Emaileri, a Finnish ESP with a reputation for allowing spam.

Oct
12

The Democratic Governors Assocation: Spamming

The Democratic Governors Association (DGA), an arm of the U.S. Democratic political party whose goal is to elect Democrats as governors of U.S. States, is spamming heavily on behalf of political campaigns across the country. Their ESP is Silverpop, currently owned by IBM.

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Sep
22

Regus Finland still spamming

Regus still spamming, still through Edatis, still using purchased lists.

Spamming IP: 83.136.212.5
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