Jul
29

Washington Post: Ignoring Unsubscribes

The Washington Post, one of the major newspapers in the U.S., just started emailing advertisements to the email addresses of people who have accounts there to comment. I was foolish, and provided my usual blog commenting email address instead of a tagged address that I could turn off if needed. :/ I unsubscribed, and also sent email to their ESP E-Dialog (now eBay). The unwanted advertising emails have continued. I want to warn users that either the Washington Post is ignoring unsubscribes or E-Dialog’s unsubscribe system is unconscionably slow despite having (twice now) confirmed that my email address was removed.

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Jul
28

GroupOn: Emailing Coupons to a 10-year-dead Email Address

GroupOn, the massive social media site which has sent surprisingly little spam for the past year, is now hitting an email address that was shut down before 2005. GroupOn sent the email through their own IP range; no ESP was involved.

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Jul
24

P. R. Paige: Spamming to Advertise His New Book

P. R. Paige, who has written a “romantic comedy” (his term) about male infidelity, is emailing advertisements for that book to a very dirty purchased list. Mr. Paige’s spam just barely qualifies as Mainsleaze, but it was sent through ESP Constant Contact.

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Jul
14

MK Ärilahendused OÜ: Estonian spam for hire targeting Finnish businesses

MK Ärilahendused OÜ is an Estonian business (registry code 12318871) whose M.O. is spam, specifically spam-for-hire – sending spam on behalf of others. “Äri” means business and “lahendused” translates to “solutions”, so it’s “MK Business Solutions Ltd” for those of us who are challenged with respect to Estonian.

MK Ärilahendused OÜ has been noticed by no.spam.ee. The sole owner of this business, Dmitri Mihhailov, is featured on the site, indicating that MK Ärilahendused OÜ has been at it for soon two years.

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Jul
10

OPR-Vakuus Oy (yritysluotto.fi): Advertising business loans to spamtraps

Yesterday, I received spam advertising business loans from yritysluotto.fi to the address listed for my business in the YTJ (Finnish Business Information System). So did hundreds of Finnish YTJ spamtraps to which I have visibility. The sender is OPR-Vakuus Oy (www, biz reg, people responsible), who have been at this for at least a year and a half.
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Jul
06

HireBlast: Blasting Job Offers to a Typoed Email Address

HireBlast, a job information site, has been emailing job offers to one of my spamtraps for a few weeks. These emails are sent through Amazon’s Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), which functions as both an ESP and an SMTP relay service.

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Jul
04

Secure America Now: Joe Job? Or Spamming A Purchased/Scraped List?

Secure America Now, a political web site whose splash page promotes the impeachment of U.S. President Barack Obama, just emailed a spamtrap email address at a former European ISP. The email address has not been live for several years, and formerly belonged to a citizen of that country who had no ties to the United States. The email was sent through NationBuilder, a “community organizer” that uses ESP Sendgrid.

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Jul
03

Buckaroo: Emailing Scraped Email Addresses or Purchased List

Today Buckaroo emailed a list of scraped or purchased email addresses advertising its services and requesting the recipients to “claim their Buckaroo Account”. The email addresses that they emailed have not been live for more than ten years, if they ever existed. It appears that Buckaroo scraped old web-based business registries or similar sources of data, or purchased a list from somebody who did. The ESP is Puresend.

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Jul
03

Beach Cove Resort: Emailing 10+ Year old List? Or Purchased List?

Today vacation advertiser Vacation Myrtle Beach sent spam advertising one of their properties (“Beach Cove Resort”) to a number of spamtraps. If these spamtraps were ever live, they were closed over ten years ago. One is almost certainly a pristine spamtrap, and not one that was likely created through a typo. (The spamtrap domain belonged to an ISP.) In other words, this sender is sending to a list that might be old and very poorly maintained, but contains indications of having been purchased or email appended. The ESP is ExactTarget, a subsidiary of Salesforce.com.

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Jun
09

Karachi, Colombia, Sheikh Ahmed, and Filip Poutintsev

Filip’s got a site up on 93.190.138.215, reachable via his “Colombian” domain. I suppose Worldstream.nl might not entertain him for very long, and I was right, of course.

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