Jan
25

toiminnanohjaustieto.com: Blog spam at Mainsleaze

Somebody, or it might be something, just visited the Mainsleaze blog from 217.149.52.111 (web111.webhotelli.fi), trying to leave a comment on the Microsoft spam posting I made yesterday. Too bad the comment itself had nothing to offer on the Microsoft issue; it was merely comment spam in a blog, advertising some content on the blog of toiminnanohjaustieto.com (e-Devel.fi Ky) that is somehow related to Microsoft products.  I gave the owner of the biz a call and let him know; he says everything to do with their site happens through an advertising agency they use, which he did not name.  Their WordPress content looks like it’s all auto-linked from elsewhere. Gee…

Jan
19

Cheetahmail: Giving Up Email Append (YES!)

Today Ben Isaacson, the deliverability and compliance manager at Cheetahmail, posted a blog on the Cheetahmail web site, “A CheetahMail New Years’ Resolution: Giving Up Email Append”.

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Jan
17

How to Hit a Spamtrap and Do It Right

H-E-B, a regional grocery chain in south-central Texas and northeastern Mexico, is sending bulk email confirmation requests to a pure spamtrap with an associated name that never belonged to that spamtrap. The requests appear to be confirmed opt-in (COI) requests. If they are, then the spamtrap will not be added to H-E-B’s list despite either a typo during the subscription process or a subscription forgery. (Spamtraps don’t respond to confirmation requests any more than they subscribe for bulk email.) The sending ESP is PulsePoint.

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Jan
10

A Blast from the Past: Return Path Acquires OtherInBox

This morning a heavy hitter in the legitimate bulk email community, reputation service Return Path, announced that it has acquired OtherInBox, an interesting free webmail provider with some good tools for managing email overload. Return Path plans to use the data that users of OtherInBox generate by their activities to improve its main reputation products and gain more insight into “the user experience” with email.

Despite my respect for Return Path and interest in their activities, I doubt I’d have bothered to comment on this except for an interesting side issue: the founder of OtherInBox is Joshua Baer, a former titan in the spam email business in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I became aware of OtherInBox a few months ago after I stumbled across Baer on Twitter and, wanting to find out what he was up to, went over to the OtherInBox web site.

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Jan
07

Chase Bank: Including Customer Information in Marketing Email Sent to Spamtraps

Months after I first blogged about Chase Bank sending marketing emails to an email address that had been closed for many years via Acxiom Digital, and after I added a comment to that blog indicating that Chase was sending marketing emails to a different email address via Epsilon Interactive (Bigfoot Interactive), this second email address is *still* receiving the same bulk emails. Worse, they STILL contain the customer’s name and the last four digits of the customer’s credit card number, although the customer has not owned this email address for years!

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Jan
01

Happy 2012!

I’m back from the holiday road trip, a much needed vacation, so my blogs will resume as of today. It appears that InfiniteMho spent the intervening two weeks on his computer. Thanks for keeping up the blogging, Atro! Now somebody needs to give him and his family tickets to Tahiti so that he can get *off* the computer for a bit and relax. 😉

Dec
20

Blogging during the Holiday Season

Blogging will be light during the Christmas season, for the next two weeks, at least from me. I will be away from home on a road trip and visiting friends. I have not specifically asked the other bloggers, but assume that they will have other things to think about during this time as well. It would be nice if the spammers were also taking a vacation (sigh), but I see little hope of that. So not to worry: <Schwarznegger on> I’ll be back!<Schwarzenegger off>

Merry Christmas! (Feel free to substitute the holiday you celebrate or general good wishes.) 😉

Dec
07

Bank of America: Transactional Email to a Spamtrap :(

Bank of America is sending non-bulk transactional emails to an email address that was closed in 2008, and that subsequently rejected all email for a period of over a year before being re-enabled as a spamtrap. The email contains a customer name and the last four digits of a credit card number. :/ This is not spam; the email was not bulk. However, if Bank of America were paying attention to bounces, it should long since have realized that this email address was not receiving its notifications. Bank of America needs to verify its customer list NOW to fix this security breach. The ESP is ExactTarget.

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Nov
22

Citibank: Emailing Sensitive Private Credit Card Information to a Spamtrap

First Chase Bank sent marketing emails that contained personal names and credit card information to spamtraps. Now Citibank is doing the same thing. Today Citibank sent a bulk marketing email to an email address that, if it ever existed at all, has been closed since 2007. The email contained a name and the last four digits of a credit card number. Either Citibank is deliberately including made-up “customer” information to make bulk marketing email look more legitimate (which I doubt), or Citibank has badly mismanaged its customer list *AND* (worse) is including sensitive personal information in marketing emails that are going to unconfirmed and incorrect email addresses. The ESP is Epsilon Interactive via its ESP Bigfoot Interactive.

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Nov
18

J. D. Falk: 1974-2011

Yesterday, after a year-long struggle with stomach cancer, J.D. Falk — one of the giants in the anti-spam, email, and Internet world — died, sadly at just 37 years of age.

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