Grassfire Nation, a U.S.-based conservative political action group, is sending bulk email to an email address that has been closed for many years. That email address rejected all email at SMTP time for at least twelve consecutive months before being re-enabled as a spamtrap. Grassfire mails from its own IPs; no ESP appears to have been involved.
Days Inn, a popular budget/family hotel chain that is part of the Wyndham Hotels and Resorts Group, is sending bulk email to a long-closed email address. That email address rejected all email at SMTP time for about fifteen months before being re-enabled as a spamtrap. The ESP is Acxiom Digital.
Banking and travel company American Express is sending bulk email to a long-closed email address. This email address has been closed since 2002, and for a three year period rejected all email at SMTP time. In the years since it became a spamtrap, American Express has not contacted this email address. The ESP is Acxiom Digital (formerly Digital Impact).
Super Hot Casino Games, an online gambling web site, is sending bulk email to <spamtrap@spambouncer.org>. Really. 🙂 That’s the old public spam reporting address at spambouncer.org, used mostly by users of the long-unmaintained SpamBouncer spam filtering program. That email address is probably in every decent suppression list and listwashing list on the planet. Super Hot Casino Games is obviously not validating subscriptions on their web site.
The ESP is BlueHornet, a subsidiary of ESP Digital River. Has BlueHornet abandoned all sanity checking on client email lists as well?
UEI College, a career/trade school with campuses across the United States and in Canada, is sending bulk email to a long-closed email address. The email states that, “You recently registered with a network website to receive special online offers.” This is not true for any reasonable definition of “recently”. This email address has been closed since 2008. Either UEI College accepts unverified subscriptions and somebody typoed an email address and domain, or UEI College purchased a list. This statement appears in a great deal of bulk email sent by ESP Yesmail. I wonder why, when it has so obviously not been true for emails sent to my spamtraps.
American Family, a membership web site that offers “points” and prizes for participation, is sending bulk email to a long-closed email address. The email states that, “You recently registered with a network website to receive special online offers.” This is not true for any reasonable definition of “recently”. This email address has been closed since 2007. Either American Family accepts unverified subscriptions and somebody typoed an email address and domain, or American Family purchased a list. The ESP is Yesmail.
ChamberOfCommerce.com, a web site/service owned by Hargray, is sending bulk email to several long-closed email addresses. The ESP is Sendgrid.
The largest job posting site in the world, Monster.com, is sending bulk email to a huge number of spamtraps. So far they’ve hit at least two dozen of mine, and in addition mailed the only email address that I ever used to sign up there. That email address was closed eight years ago, and a few years later re-enabled and turned into a spamtrap. There is no ESP involvement; Monster did this from its own IPs.
Does this count as Mainsleaze? Whitepapers Weekly is not a big brand that I know of, but they seem to be sending mail via a legitimate email service provider called Benchmark Email, to email addresses that have never existed. Apparently, this time around, they’re dying to talk to me about enterprise database options.
Wyndham hotels and resorts is continuing to send offers to the old, long-closed email address that I blogged about a few weeks ago. In addition, it is now hitting another similar email address. :/ The ESP is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.