Transportation management consulting company Ahern & Associates, which appeared on the Mainsleaze blog once already, is emailing a large number of spamtraps, at least a half dozen of which are non-typoed pristine spamtraps. This time, they are emailing through ESP Vertical Response, which has been completely unresponsive to spam complaints for the past few months.
Longtime spamming company Knowledge Hub Networks emailed a non-typoed pristine spamtrap today. I would not normally blog about such a company on the Mainsleaze Spam blog, because in my view a company whose sole means of obtaining business is spamming purchased and email appended lists does not meet the criterion of “an otherwise legitimate company”. However, these days they are spamming through a legitimate ESP — Vertical Response.
Today clothing retailer Coldwater Creek emailed about a dozen spamtraps with a sales announcement. About a third of those spamtraps were probable typos. Several others were repurposed spamtraps, some of them not live for well over a decade. One was a pristine spamtrap at a domain that has never had a legitimate email address. The ESP was the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SMC), previously known of as ExactTarget.
Today PublicHealthCorps, a non-profit organization that I have never heard of before and that has a newly-registered domain, spammed the administrative email address for this blog. The spam requests that we post their information at intervals during the coming year. The ESP is JangoMail, an old marketing company that used to send a lot of spam but hasn’t recently.
Today travel aggregator YTB sent several dozen bulk emails to my spamtraps, offering a three-night stay at an unspecified location for $189. Most of the spamtraps were repurposed email addresses, but a few were pristine spamtraps that were not likely typotraps. The ESP was Silverpop, which was bought by IBM in 2014.
Yesterday and today Facebook emailed several thousand of my spamtraps, reminding them that “just one step” was needed to join the social networking site. The problem is, none of these spamtraps ever *asked* to join Facebook. None of them send email. Some of them never existed at all, and of those that were once live email addresses, several were closed in the late 1990s — before Facebook existed. Facebook sent these emails from their own IPs; no ESP was involved.
A few days ago, it looks like Effortia Oy has managed to obtain service with Mandrill, MailChimp’s transactional email arm. There is nothing transactional about their spam, and it’s just more of the same as before.
A relatively recently formed business, Regus Management (Finland) Oy (biz reg) is using spam to fictitious personal data to advertise their wares. The spam service provider is Emaileri, a Finnish ESP with a reputation for allowing spam.
The Brazil division of US-based retailing giant Walmart is spamming purchased or email appended lists from Microsoft’s CloudApp service. Walmart Brazil (as opposed to Walmart itself) has a long record of spamming dirty purchased lists. Walmart has dropped the ball enforcing minimally acceptable email marketing standards on its badly-behaved subsidiary.