Aug
25

DriveThruRPG: Legitimate Email to a Spamtrap, AND Hacked Account/Botnet Spam? :(

A customer of online roleplaying/gaming web market DriveThruRPG, Wizards of the Coast, is emailing a spamtrap in my collection. A single bulk email to a repurposed spamtrap is not in itself a huge problem, but it is a sign that a list needs attention. Since a botnet spammer has also been emailing spamtraps with forged email addresses @drivethrurpg.com, I wanted to be sure that DriveThruRPG and its ESP, MailChimp’s transactional email service Mandrill, knew that a DriveThruRPG customer also has a spamtrap on its list.

Read more…

Aug
12

Filip Poutintsev: Apparently no longer an issue

Filip Poutintsev keeps sending me private email asking me to remove all mentions of him from this blog.

That’s not going to happen, as it would be revisionist history, but I’ll say it that his ROKSO entry appears to have been dropped in early April after he had lain low for half a year. I also have no other evidence connecting him to any recent spamming. To my knowledge, he is out of the spam business.

Oh, and Filip is not Sheikh Ahmed. That’s Abdul Sattar, a real Pakistani. The two did collaborate way back when, but it eventually transpired that two distinct individuals were clearly involved.

Aug
07

July 2015 in spamtraps: ESPs

ESP mail seen in spamtraps in July 2015

ESP mail seen in spamtraps in July 2015

Read more…

Jul
16

June 2015 in spamtraps: ESPs

ESP mail seen in spamtraps in June 2015

ESP mail seen in spamtraps in June 2015

Read more…

Apr
16

March 2015 in spamtraps: ESPs

Just a quick table this time, no beautiful graphs.

Read more…

Feb
20

RIP: Ellen @ Spamcop, Spamfighter Extraordinaire

A friend died last night after a brief illness, Ellen R., best known to many as “Ellen @ Spamcop”. I’ve known Ellen for a couple of decades now; she was an early stalwart in the antispam world. For many years she handled the abuse desk at Spamcop, one of the early antispam blocklists. Ellen handled everything: complaints from spammers, email from bewildered end users who did not understand why their email was blocked, misdirected spam reports from angry end users who just wanted the spam flooding their inbox to stop. She handled it all with professional courtesy and something better: genuine concern for people and a desire to help them keep their mailbox free of spam so they could find the messages that they wanted to receive.

Spammers didn’t like her much. Most other people did. I did, and I’ll miss her.

Feb
11

Does “Engagement” Matter for Email Marketing?

Today in a private forum some friends, all of them involved in one way or another with the email marketing world, were discussing a new post on the Only Influencers email blog. In that post Bob Frady (an email marketer) expresses his approval of comments by Dela Quist (another email marketer) that dismiss the importance of “engagement” in email marketing. For those who are not familiar with email marketing terms, “engagement” means the degree to which recipients of marketing email open, read, and respond to the offers presented to them.

Read more…

Feb
06

When Users Really DO NOT Want Your Email….

As I was looking through today’s crop of ESP-sent, mostly mainsleaze spam, I kept stumbling across spam sent to some of my most amusing spamtraps. These spamtraps are not typotraps so much as obvious forgeries, the sort of thing that users type when they are asked for an email address, do not want to refuse, and yet do not want to receive email from you either. Any company might have one of these on their list, but I found several companies and a number of ESPs sending to several of these obvious forgeries. Today. In the past 24 hours.

Read more…

Jan
20

Estonian professional spam operations (targeting Finland)

Finnish businesses, kindly stay away from the following Estonian businesses for your marketing needs.

  • MK Ärilahendused OÜ (recent SBL listing) / Dmitri Mihhailov Update: Listed on ROKSO
  • Scandinavian Marketing OÜ / Urmo Valle / Urmo Mark
  • Mihail Fortis (recent SBL listing; unknown if he operates as a business or not)

Read more…

Nov
01

Regarding responsibilities in affiliate marketing

Quite some time back, the Data Protection Ombudsman in Finland has issued a position paper on affiliate marketing and the division of responsibilities therein. The document is naturally in Finnish only. The core message is following the money; holding the owners of the advertised products and services responsible for the processing of personal data in such situations. This is nice when (as so often happens) the affiliate marketers violate all laws on the books, remaining anonymous, not including anything on the file of personal data they use, spamming, etc.

Go back to top