King Ice, an online retailer of hip-hop jewelry for men, today sent a bulk email advertisement to an email address that has never heard from it before, and that was closed in 2004. The email makes no claim to opt-in, and provides no postal address or contact information for the advertiser that is visible in the text portion of the email. (Most of the email consists of remotely-loaded graphics.) The ESP is Campaigner.
Today’s spam from The Political Insider, a newsletter that had previously appeared to be about conservative U.S. political issues and about which I blogged once already, consists solely of a non-political advertisement for the Pimsleur System, a well-known language education program in the U.S. As before, the email was sent by ESP BlueHornet, a division of Digital River. As before, URLs in the message body point to a marketing firm, Paramount Communication Group.
The U.S. Postal Service today sent a bulk email advertisement offering a deal on their international shipping packages to an email address that has not heard from them before, at least not since it became a spamtrap in 2003. The ESP is SilverPop.
United Airlines, a major U.S. based airline with routes around the world, just sent a bulk email advertisement to an email address that never heard from it before. The spamtrap address was closed in 2004. Nonetheless, the email contains a name and a OnePass (United’s frequent flyer program) number or scrambled version of it in the header and a masked version in the message body. This suggests one of two possibilities: that United is emailing uncontacted email addresses after years of ignoring bounces and undeliverables, or possibly that United hired an e-append firm. The ESP is Responsys.
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. 🙂
B&Q, a large U.K.-based home improvement retailer, is sending product recall notices to a large number of email addresses that were closed years ago, some as long as a decade ago. I have seen occasional B&Q spams to one-off spamtrap email addresses before, but nothing like this. The ESP is Responsys.
U.S. computer manufacturer Dell Computers is *once again* sending bulk email advertisements to an email address that didn’t ask to receive them. This email came not from Dell Small Business, a perennial offender against opt-in that I blogged about early this year, but the Dell Consumer division. This time the ESP is E-Dialog.
A couple of months ago the Senate campaign of Joe Kyrillos in New Jersey began sending campaign emails to one of my spamtraps, an email address that was closed in 2004. The email nonetheless indicates that the email address was added to the system on March 30, 2012. The email was sent by ESP BlueHornet, a division of Digital River. URLs in the message body point to a marketing firm, GeniusMailer.