The re-election campaign of U.S. Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida apparently learned nothing from the backlash against its first spam three days ago, because it spammed again today and hit the same spamtrap as it did then. It has switched ESPs, from Salsalabs, the ESP side of liberal U.S. political activist group Wired for Change, to ExactTarget.
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.
Markkinointitoimisto Push! Oy (a/k/a Push! Marketing Management Ltd, see also biz reg) are spamming, and are doing so illegally in several ways, including but perhaps not limited to violating a previously expressed opt-out.
Do you know who Compensation Management Resources is? I do not. Nonetheless, they’re sending mail to an address at a domain that has had no valid users since at least early 2007 (but probably much longer). The sender’s methodology seems legitimate — they’re using a legitimate list management software package called Lyris. But the address they’re sending to sure feels like evidence of spam to me.
The ESP or list owner seems to be Business 21 Publishing, based in Pennsylvania in the USA. Their Lyris server appears to be hosted by an ISP called NetAtlantic.
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.
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.
Not that it’s very useful. Yesmail is still just as Yesmail as before.
This morning when I logged on and checked my spamtrap, I found over two dozen spams from Turkish Airlines, which I believe is the national airline in Turkey. Somebody — specifically, somebody responsible for Turkish Airlines Iran, if the From addresses are any clue — purchased a very dirty list. I don’t recall ever seeing spam from Turkish Airlines before, so if Turkish Airlines has no idea how this came about, I would recommend investigating the marketing department for somebody who believes in the tooth fairy, responds to 419 Advance Fee Fraud scams, and thinks that there is such a thing as an “opt-in” list for sale. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.
An organization that calls itself “Conservatives United 2012” but that has no web site that I could find and sends email as conservativesunited2012@gmail.com instead of under a domain of its own, just started sending bulk email to an email address that was created earlier this year and subscribed only to former senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s campaign list. The email was sent by ESP BlueHornet, a division of Digital River. URLs in the message body point to email marketing firm VerveMail.
Cellectis SA, an old acquaintance on this site, continues to spam scientists, which is not altogether very surprising given EmailVision’s rather lackluster response the last time around. We hear there’s a new guy in town (manning abuse@, that is), so let’s see.