Nov
13

Blogging Hiatus Over :-)

As most of you noticed, I took a break from blogging for the past month. For three weeks of it I was on an extended driving trip around the Colorado Plateau (Valley of Fire State Park, Zion National Park, North Rim Grand Canyon, and lots else). I’m now back, however, and the mainsleaze spam is if anything increasing as time goes on, even after the flood of political spam dropped to a trickle after last Tuesday. So (my) blogging resumes today.

Hat tip to my colleague Atro Tossavainen for keeping the site going while I was gone. 🙂

Nov
09

Lateralus Enterprise / Tavoite Media: Illegally disrespecting opt-out and spamming to sell magazine subscriptions

This was sent to my business address, the use of which I’ve forbidden from the sender no later than September 19, 2011.  This is a repeat of a spam sent on September 28. It says “You have received this offer because you have subscribed to our newsletter.” Well surprise surprise, the biz didn’t.  The domain name mentioned for complaints is expired and leads nowhere, so you can’t actually write to “them”, and you can’t view the URL that supposedly contains the address source, because the domain is parked.
Read more…

Oct
17

Lateralus Enterprise / Tavoite Media: Spamming to sell SEO services to spamtraps

Lateralus Enterprise / Tavoite Media is spamming again, this time to advertise its own search engine optimization services.

Read more…

Oct
15

CL-Yhtiöpalvelu: Renting temps to spamtraps

CL-Yhtiöpalvelu Oy (biz reg, www) is spamming to sell temps to spamtraps. Their partner in spam this time is Panic Marketing, who are unfortunately no stranger here. Their list is based on “Public sources on the Internet”, i.e. we’re spamming and we know it.

Read more…

Oct
15

Power Competence: Selling business presentation skills to spamtraps

Power Competence Oy (see biz reg, www) joins the hordes of those businesses who figured purchasing a mailing list from Lateralus Enterprise / Tavoite Media / bisnesrekisteri.fi was a good idea. Unsubs and sending, I think, are handled by Developer’s Helsinki, aka netmonitor.fi, whose Terms of Service don’t seem to contain a single word on the topic of using the service to send unsolicited bulk email.  Their services, in turn, are provided by Nebula, whose current Terms of Service (apparently only available in Finnish) don’t contain a single word on the topic.  The old ones at Nebula, valid for contracts made before June 1, 2012, said that the customer is not allowed to use the Service for direct marketing that is either illegal or against good manners or to advertise their service in newsgroups, discussion forums or in other places where it is forbidden to do so. (My translation.)  The argument that all spam is against good manners doesn’t ring a bell with them, apparently.

Read more…

Oct
09

Quit smoking today!!!

During October, I’ve been seeing spam to my traps that has to do with quitting smoking with the help of electronic nicotine dispensers. It’s so far off the scale it’s not really mainsleaze, but there’s a few things here that need being published.

Read more…

Oct
09

Lateralus Enterprise / Tavoite Media diving into “B2C”… with a harvest of the Finnish Business Information System

Ouch. Ouch!!!! How many ways can you fail?
Read more…

Oct
09

Redbox: COI Doesn’t Fix All Bulk Email Problems

Because Redbox has been actively confirming subscriptions to its lists, I’ve kept quiet about the spamtrap hits that I see from them. They’re doing the right thing to confirm. I don’t want to discourage them. But their initial acquisition process for these email addresses is resulting in more initial spamtrap hits than any reputable company whose bulk email I’ve observed before. I think that they and their ESPs — Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian, and ExactTarget — need to know this. Further, this raises an important issue for many companies that use bulk email: what to do about problems that confirmed opt-in (COI) doesn’t solve.

Read more…

Oct
06

Political Spam This Week: Mitt Romney (sigh)

It became obvious in the past week that the real story of political spam in this campaign doesn’t involve ESPs and legitimate bulk email. It involves snowshoe spam being sent either by U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign, or a supporter. Whoever is sending this spam is sending much larger quantities of spam to purchased and other non-opt-in lists than all of the legitimate campaign mailing lists and ESPs combined.

Read more…

Sep
30

Political Spam Today: Donate! (Continued…)

This *weekend* the presidential campaigns doubled down on spam, as an FEC deadline at the end of September crept up upon them. Eight spams, all from one of the presidential campaigns or a Democratic Party campaign committee. One single spamtrap received copies of six of these eight spams. I’m not the typical email recipient, but if I had received that many begging emails from a candidate that I supported, I’d be tempted to vote for his opponent.

Read more…

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