U.S.-based publisher American Media, Inc. is sending email advertisements for Reality Weekly Magazine to an email address that has not belonged to a real person for over four years. This email address has not previously received email from American Media since it completed its timeout period and was re-enabled as a spamtrap. The ESP is Yesmail, a subsidiary of Infogroup.
Residential real estate investment firm True Wholesale Houses is sending bulk email advertisements to an email address that was closed in 2003. The firm has a plausible, but incorrect, name associated with the email address, which normally indicates an e-pended list. This email address has also not previously received email from this firm. The ESP is Sendgrid.
Schneider Electric Finland Oy is one of the many parties whose customer registers contained, presumably quite legitimately, the addresses of many employees of Savon Voima Oyj, the previous owners of the atro.fi domain. I requested them to clean their registers of email addresses at this domain on December 9, 2011, and received a response from them the same day in which they indicated that they would be cleaning their lists. I am sad to report that it didn’t happen. Several addresses that used to belong to Savon Voima employees received an ad from them today. The ESP is Damex Multimedia Oy. Update Jan 16: They tell me in private email they’ve just done a s/atro.fi/newdomain.example/g in their address register. I can’t tell if the new addresses are all valid, but at least it won’t be my problem any more…
The California State Board of Equalization, the tax authority of the U.S. state of California, sent a bulk email reminder to pay taxes to an email address that was closed in 2003 and has not received legitimate email for many, MANY years. Nonetheless, like most email sent by ESP Yesmail from this particular set of IPs, the spam claims that this long-dead email address “recently registered with a network website to receive special online offers”.
I wonder if this qualifies as mainsleaze. But it isn’t botspam, at least. Looking at the rDNS for 46.29.200.0/21, one might be tempted to call it snowshoe spam. Over fifteen hundred separate MXes, and just about nothing but MXes?
MACEF, Fiera Milano S.p.A., an Italian “international home show”, is spamming the Customer Service address at the atro.fi domain, which clearly does not have any customer service. The messages are sent through yaweb.it, Diennea Informatica di Maurizio Fionda.
Cabelas, a U.S.-based outdoor supplies retailer, is sending bulk email to an email address that was just re-enabled after passing its twelve-month timeout period. Assuming that the previous owner of this email address had signed up to receive Cabelas email, Cabelas ignored twelve months of 500-level SMTP rejections and continued to email this email address. That’s right — Cabelas is asking a customer whose email bounced for at least a year to rate his (or her) satisfaction with his purchases. As people say on Twitter, #LAME.
Unlike most companies that send bulk email, Cabelas does not appear to use an ESP; this email was sent from their own IPs.
I had posted back in November about Serena Software mailing a spamtrap via Marketo. Serena is now hitting not one, not two, not even a handful, but rather slightly below a hundred pure spamtraps.
SalsaLabs, the ESP side of liberal U.S. political activist group Wired for Change, is sending bulk email to yet more email addresses that were closed years ago, inviting the owners to a Webinar on the tools and techniques for advocacy organizations. Since SalsaLabs is an ESP as well as an organization that provides tools and training to mostly-liberal and leftist advocacy groups, this email was sent by them from their own IPs.
High-tech jobs board Dice, an institution in Silicon Valley and other high-tech centers, is sending bulk email advertisements to an email address that has not belonged to a real person since 2005. This email address has not previously received email from Dice since it completed its timeout period and was re-enabled as a spamtrap. Its previous owner also reports that he never posted a resume on Dice nor signed up to receive any sort of email from Dice. Either somebody made a typo or maliciously subscribed this email address on the Dice web site, or Dice purchased a list. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.