eBay, the world’s garage sale, just sent email to a spamtrap notifying it that it had won an auction. eBay has no ESP to blame for its failure to notice that a user’s email address died at least three years ago, and the domain itself at least eighteen months ago. eBay sent this email from its own IPs.
— Mickey Chandler, Spamtacular
‘Nuff said. 😉
The self titled “Business Guru” (www in Finnish, www in English at alternate domain) is selling the standard fare, B2B spam lists. The yritysguru.fi domain is registered to Mikael Suominen as a private person. The finnishcompanyregistry.com domain is WhoisGuard Protected. The actual hosting of both is cloaked by CloudFlare.
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The Washington Post, one of the major newspapers in the U.S., just started emailing advertisements to the email addresses of people who have accounts there to comment. I was foolish, and provided my usual blog commenting email address instead of a tagged address that I could turn off if needed. :/ I unsubscribed, and also sent email to their ESP E-Dialog (now eBay). The unwanted advertising emails have continued. I want to warn users that either the Washington Post is ignoring unsubscribes or E-Dialog’s unsubscribe system is unconscionably slow despite having (twice now) confirmed that my email address was removed.
The Data Protection Ombudsman has decided that ACC Consulting Oy cannot be brought into line with advice and guidance alone, and has passed the matter on to the Data Protection Board with a requirement to impose a conditional fine to ensure compliance.
This was sent in private email on Feb 12 in response to a spam. No response has been received so far.
A little bird told me that the Asiakkuusmarkkinointiliitto (“Customership Marketing Association”, for lack of an official translation) (www, biz reg, register of associations) has posted an anonymous opinion piece that basically says they think spamtrapping is illegal.
Suomalainen Kirjakauppa (www, biz reg), one of Finland’s largest bookstores (and oldest registered businesses) has been terminated previously by a Finnish ESP, and by a Swedish ESP operating in Finland, both for the use of bad data that hit spamtraps and landed their IPs onto blocklists. It is very likely that they aren’t deliberately spamming B2C (though it must be said that B2B spam that is guaranteed to be spam has been seen from them too), but by steadfastly refusing to clean bad/old/bad and old data from their legitimately acquired B2C lists, they have degenerated into spammers.
In early December 2013 the Canadian government announced that the 2010 Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) will go into effect on July 1, 2014. Although this law covers considerably more ground than just unsolicited bulk email (spam), it is very good news for those who fight spam, and especially good news for those of us who fight spam by otherwise legitimate companies. The reason? CASL requires (with some limited exceptions) that recipients of bulk email give explicit consent to receive the email before it is sent. In other words, CASL requires opt-in. Unlike the U.S. CAN-SPAM law and many other laws in many other countries, CASL actually forbids most spam.
CASL also has teeth. Violations of the CASL opt-in requirement can draw fines as high as $10 million Canadian per infringing email. By all appearances, the Canadian government agencies responsible for enforcement of CASL are prepared to enforce the law vigorously.