Feb
24

January 2015 ESP Spam: Some Notes….

I see that Atro Tossavainen graphed the spam that we saw in January. Atro and I manage a substantial spamtrap collection together, so I have seen what he posted about. Nothing there surprised me except the hugely disproportionate amount of spam Topica sends to our spamtraps. I’ve blogged twice about Topica, and in the last blog recommended blocking their /22 because of the amounts of spam and probability that little or no non-spam email is sent from them any more. However, I did not realize that we were seeing twice as much spam from Topica as from ExactTarget, which sends several orders of magnitude more email than they do.

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Feb
23

January 2015 in spamtraps: ESPs

Here’s how the various email service providers (ESPs) rated on our “hitting spamtraps” scale in January 2015:

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Feb
20

RIP: Ellen @ Spamcop, Spamfighter Extraordinaire

A friend died last night after a brief illness, Ellen R., best known to many as “Ellen @ Spamcop”. I’ve known Ellen for a couple of decades now; she was an early stalwart in the antispam world. For many years she handled the abuse desk at Spamcop, one of the early antispam blocklists. Ellen handled everything: complaints from spammers, email from bewildered end users who did not understand why their email was blocked, misdirected spam reports from angry end users who just wanted the spam flooding their inbox to stop. She handled it all with professional courtesy and something better: genuine concern for people and a desire to help them keep their mailbox free of spam so they could find the messages that they wanted to receive.

Spammers didn’t like her much. Most other people did. I did, and I’ll miss her.

Feb
18

sahkopostitus.com (WebSiteRace Oy): Finland’s latest spam for hire

We’ve recently seen spam advertising the spamming and spam list sale services of sahkopostitus.com, apparently operated by WebSiteRace Oy. It’s funny because they specifically claim knowledge of (but not adherence to, I suppose) of the legislation relevant to the issue at hand.

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Feb
14

International Sales Group: Selling High-End Real Estate to Bankrupt Real Estate Firms?

Florida-based real estate sales firm International Sales Group (ISG) is emailing a list that contains almost a dozen of my spamtraps. Most of those spamtraps were email addresses at real estate firms that went bankrupt between 2008 and 2011. ISG is either emailing a list that they have not contacted in years, or they bought a list or hired an email appender. Their ESP is Vertical Response, whose abuse department appears to have gone AWOL sometime in 2014.

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Feb
11

Does “Engagement” Matter for Email Marketing?

Today in a private forum some friends, all of them involved in one way or another with the email marketing world, were discussing a new post on the Only Influencers email blog. In that post Bob Frady (an email marketer) expresses his approval of comments by Dela Quist (another email marketer) that dismiss the importance of “engagement” in email marketing. For those who are not familiar with email marketing terms, “engagement” means the degree to which recipients of marketing email open, read, and respond to the offers presented to them.

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Feb
06

When Users Really DO NOT Want Your Email….

As I was looking through today’s crop of ESP-sent, mostly mainsleaze spam, I kept stumbling across spam sent to some of my most amusing spamtraps. These spamtraps are not typotraps so much as obvious forgeries, the sort of thing that users type when they are asked for an email address, do not want to refuse, and yet do not want to receive email from you either. Any company might have one of these on their list, but I found several companies and a number of ESPs sending to several of these obvious forgeries. Today. In the past 24 hours.

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Jan
29

Ahern and Associates: ONCE AGAIN Spamming a Purchased or Email Appended List

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.

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Jan
20

Estonian professional spam operations (targeting Finland)

Finnish businesses, kindly stay away from the following Estonian businesses for your marketing needs.

  • MK Ärilahendused OÜ (recent SBL listing) / Dmitri Mihhailov Update: Listed on ROKSO
  • Scandinavian Marketing OÜ / Urmo Valle / Urmo Mark
  • Mihail Fortis (recent SBL listing; unknown if he operates as a business or not)

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Jan
19

Knowledge Hub Networks: Spamming a Pristine Spamtrap

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.

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