MainSleaze

Long, long ago I registered an email address on the San Jose Mercury News website for some reason or other. Today, somebody called the Twin Cities Pioneer Press is sending mail to me at the address I gave only to the Mercury News. Was my email address stolen or sold? No, probably not. A quick investigation reveals that both newspapers are owned by the same company, MediaNews Group. Was it spam? Most definitely! Somebody I didn’t give my email address to (Pioneer Press) is sending me mail to an address that I gave to some other company (or in this case, sister company). It may or may not be legal, but it is most certainly a bad practice.

This came from an IP range registered to MediaNews Group. The “parent” of this IP space is registered to an ESP called Skylist. It is unclear to me if Skylist provides service to this company or not. I don’t know enough about how these type of IP range registrations work.

Source IP: 96.46.128.55.

Received: from mail3.mail.twincities.com (mail3.mail.twincities.com [96.46.128.55]) by x.x (Postfix) with ESMTP id x <x@x>; Tue, 29 Nov 2011 xx:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
Received: by mail3.mail.twincities.com id x for <x@x.com>; Tue, 29 Nov 2011 x:x:x -0600 (envelope-from <bounce-x@mail.twincities.com>)
From: Twin Cities Pioneer Press <newsletters@mail.twincities.com>
To: x <x@x>
Subject: Kate Bosworth welcomes you to your own personal celebrity style experience. Half off your first piece
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-MNGI: x
list-unsubscribe: <mailto:unsub-x@mail.twincities.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 x:x:x -0600