Yesterday I updated the links on the MainSleaze Spam Blog. Most of the changes were incremental, but there is a new category of links: security-related bloggers and sites. I did this because malware, hacking, and abuse of security breaches — long the realm of criminal spammers who primarily used botnets or malware-infected servers — has unfortunately leaked into the activities of legitimate companies and ESPs.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), about whom I already blogged a couple of weeks ago, has apparently added some more email addresses that did not opt-in to its list in the last couple of weeks and is spamming them. The ESP is still Salsalabs, the ESP side of liberal U.S. political activist group Wired for Change.
AutoMarke, a web-based retailer of automotive accessories for Russian customers, sent an advertising email to a spamtrap that, if it ever existed (which is doubtful), was closed in 2002. As best I know, this spamtrap has never heard from AutoMarke before. The ESP is Sendgrid, whose authorized use policy explicitly requires that bulk email sent through their service be opt-in only.
German advertising agency Arena Direkt GmbH is sending advertising emails to an email address that never existed, offering the chance to win a BMW 528i automobile. The email is in German, and the name that is used to address the owner of the email is a German name that was never associated with that email address, so this looks like an e-pended spamtrap. The ESP is Optivo, a highly rated German ESP whose terms and conditions do not permit the sending of unsolicited bulk email (spam).
The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, a non-profit organization that promotes “education for sustainability” in K-12 classrooms, has sent unsolicited bulk email to a third-party list. The email addresses on that list were originally scraped from other non-profit organization web sites of all kinds, including many whose focus was completely unrelated to what the Cloud Institute does and promotes. The ESP is Your Mailing List Provider (YMLP), a smaller mostly self-service ESP with very little tolerance for spam.
This issue has been resolved. The blog remains posted because blogs shouldn’t disappear, to make sure that Google and other search engines and archives get the update, and in hopes that other people can learn something from it and the comments. 🙂
Realty One Group, which describes itself as “Nevada’s #1 Full Service Residential Real Estate Brokerage” (wheew!), a few months ago began sending bulk email newsletters to an email address that closed in 2008. Today’s newsletter is for… *Facebook* users… who struggle with the new Timeline feature. (Huh?) This spamtrap receives quite a bit of real-estate-related spam, so I think that it once belonged to a real estate agent who moved on after the market collapsed. The ESP is Streamsend.
Markkinointitoimisto Push! Oy (a/k/a Push! Marketing Management Ltd, see also biz reg) are spamming, and are doing so illegally in several ways, including but perhaps not limited to violating a previously expressed opt-out.
Common Good, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that is promoting reforms to legal and governmental processes, just sent email for the first time to a spamtrap that was closed in 2004. The email refers to the owner of that spamtrap address by a plausible but incorrect name, which suggests an e-pended email address. The ESP is Blue State Digital.