Argentinian electronics retailer Las Malvinas Electro just sent bulk email for the first time to an email address that has been closed for years, if it was ever active at all. The domain is active, and belongs to an American who does not speak Spanish and has no connection to Argentina or anywhere in South America. The ESP is Lyris, also known of as Uptilt and Emaillabs.
Godiva, legendary U.S. maker of fine chocolates, is leaving a very bad taste in my mouth because they do not respect customer opt-out from marketing emails. :/ I occasionally order from Godiva, usually to send a birthday or thank-you present to somebody. I have an account, with a tagged email address. When created, that account was opted out of all marketing emails whatsoever, as I almost always do. This time, because of previous issues with being re-added to Godiva’s marketing email list after placing an order, I phoned in the order. When giving it, I *explicitly* told the sales rep to ensure that my email address did not get added to any lists. Although Godiva sends transactional emails from their own IPs, marketing emails are sent via Acxiom Digital.
Best Buy, a large U.S.-based retailer of electronic goods, just sent a bulk email to an email address that closed in 2007. The ESP is ExactTarget.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), about whom I already blogged a couple of weeks ago, has apparently added some more email addresses that did not opt-in to its list in the last couple of weeks and is spamming them. The ESP is still Salsalabs, the ESP side of liberal U.S. political activist group Wired for Change.
AutoMarke, a web-based retailer of automotive accessories for Russian customers, sent an advertising email to a spamtrap that, if it ever existed (which is doubtful), was closed in 2002. As best I know, this spamtrap has never heard from AutoMarke before. The ESP is Sendgrid, whose authorized use policy explicitly requires that bulk email sent through their service be opt-in only.
German advertising agency Arena Direkt GmbH is sending advertising emails to an email address that never existed, offering the chance to win a BMW 528i automobile. The email is in German, and the name that is used to address the owner of the email is a German name that was never associated with that email address, so this looks like an e-pended spamtrap. The ESP is Optivo, a highly rated German ESP whose terms and conditions do not permit the sending of unsolicited bulk email (spam).
The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, a non-profit organization that promotes “education for sustainability” in K-12 classrooms, has sent unsolicited bulk email to a third-party list. The email addresses on that list were originally scraped from other non-profit organization web sites of all kinds, including many whose focus was completely unrelated to what the Cloud Institute does and promotes. The ESP is Your Mailing List Provider (YMLP), a smaller mostly self-service ESP with very little tolerance for spam.
This issue has been resolved. The blog remains posted because blogs shouldn’t disappear, to make sure that Google and other search engines and archives get the update, and in hopes that other people can learn something from it and the comments. 🙂