Budget Mobile, a French mobile phone service, today sent a bulk email advertisement to an email address that has not been live for a couple of years. The email appeared to lack an unsubscribe option, although my French is rudimentary and I did not want to retrieve images to check whether it was included in them. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.
Concord Music Group (CMG), a studio that produces and markets many styles of music, sent a bulk advertising email to a spamtrap earlier today, announcing the release of a music video by one of its jazz performers. CMG has not sent any type of email to this spamtrap (or any of my spamtraps) previously. If the spamtrap in question was ever a live email address, it was closed before 2006. The ESP is ExactTarget.
Red Hat appears to be having a hard time processing bounces and removing ancient addresses from their lists. The ESP is Eloqua.
The old Military Industrial Buyer’s Guide spammers that I blogged about back in November 2011 are back under new domains (dodsupplier.com and dodworld.com) and slightly modified name (Federal Buyer’s Guide). Their ESP is still SendGrid.
Stupido Shop, a record store in downtown Helsinki, is spamming record ads to spamtraps. Their ISP Nebula was notified of their processing of outdated and erroneous personal information on February 6, before the spamtraps opened for business. That seems to have led to nothing at all.
A young man from Espoo, Finland, a private person carrying on trade under the primary name Lateralus Enterprise d/b/a Tavoite Media, who objects to being named here and has enlisted the help of the Data Protection Ombudsman’s Office to have his name stricken from this blog, is spamming to offer his e-marketing consultation services. I’ve seen his spam at my own business starting August 2011; apparently he’s managed to listwash my business (easy enough) but unfortunately for him, my ancient spamtraps contain some addresses that are in the Finnish Business Information System too, so I get his spam this way.
Christian Dior, the French fashion house, want to sell clothes to ancient spamtraps. The ESP appears to be Prosodie.
Philip Morris GmbH, the German subsidiary of the international tobacco conglomerate, wants to promote cigarettes to ancient spamtraps. They appear to be doing their own bulk emailing.
This is so filthy it’s really hard to accept it as being mainsleaze. But it is sent by an entity that is readily identifiable from the message, it’s not botspam, and it’s not snowshoe spam, and it advertises services provided by the same entity that sent the message. So what else remains to call it but mainsleaze? Kontaktdata.se, a service of Svensk Företagsinformation Ab (“Swedish Business Information Ltd”) makes no pretenses about it. They sell and rent address lists for spamming and figure it’s all right. I don’t know if Cention are the ESP, or actually the party behind the operation.
The Sassoon Academy wants to sell a video of cutting-edge hair techniques to spamtraps. The ESP is ExactTarget.