Hewlett-Packard (Finland): Inviting spamtraps to marketing events

HP wants to invite a spamtrap to a marketing do, and in doing so, fails in a big way. They’re doing their own bulking, but some of the marketing copy is hosted by Barabra.

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Alko: Asking spamtraps to take surveys

The wine connoisseurs’ society of Alko, the Finnish govt-owned alcohol monopoly, wants to ask a spamtrap member to participate in a survey. The ESP is Feedback Dialog.

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WebmedCentral: Inviting eminent biomedical spamtraps to join their editorial board

WebmedCentral want spamtraps to join their editorial board because of [their] eminence in the biomedical field. Admittedly the spamtrap was a corresponding author in some rather minor articles published in a Finnish medical journal way, way back. It is clear the addresses this was sent to have been scraped from articles available via, or in this case, not even available but merely alluded to, on PubMed. Others writing well before me are not too convinced either.

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Finnmatkat: Using “tell a friend” marketing… to oneself?

Finnmatkat, a Finnish travel agency, appears to be using tell-a-friend marketing as an excuse to spam. The spam claims to have been sent by IT-Systems Finland Oy (it-systems.fi), but that’s only a HELO name (although the Message-ID domain goodland.fi is registered to them too…). The sending network is owned by Tenue Oy, and the rDNS domain of the sending IP address, myrootshell.com is registered personally to the NOC of Tenue, Mr Sami Holopainen.

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Barclays Bank: Sending Transactional Billing Notices to a Spamtrap

Today Barclaycard, the credit card division of U.K. banking firm Barclays, joined the MainSleaze Spam blog list of banking infamy. It did so when it sent a transactional billing email to an email address that has not been live for ten years, notifying the non-existent owner of this email address that he or she had a payment due, and including a name, last four digits of a credit card number, and tagged URLs that presumably gave anybody who received this email access to a customer’s banking records. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.

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St. Mary’s University? Or Accu-Print? Which is Spamming my Spamtrap?

Either St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, or San Antonio printer Accu-Print, is sending bulk email advertisements to a spamtrap of mine that has never heard from either of them before. The From header say’s that the sender is St. Mary’s, while the message body states that the message was sent by Accu-Print. The spamtrap in question, if it ever existed at all, was closed in 2005. The ESP is ExactTarget.

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Rodale Press/Women’s Health: Suddenly Spamming Yet Another Spamtrap

Two months after Men’s Health Magazine and Books, a subsidary of Rodale Press, began spamming one of my spamtraps, sister publication Women’s Health Magazine and Books is suddenly spamming an email address that was closed in 2004. This spamtrap email address has not received email from Women’s Health previously, at least not since it became a spamtrap. The ESP, as before, is Acxiom Digital.

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Electronic Arts: Inviting spamtraps to join the fight in Mass Effect 3

Electronic Arts is inviting spamtraps to stand up and fight in ME3. The ESP is CheetahMail, and the spamtrap ceased to exist as a real email address about 10 years prior to the release of the game.

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Sonera: Having a hard time figuring SMTP 5xx errors are permanent

Sonera wants to tell a spamtrap about the current selection available on their IPTV.  They’re doing their own bulking, and what a fantastic process it is.

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Microsoft wants spamtraps to help them focus on their customers and partners

Microsoft wants to ask spamtraps for help on focusing on their customers and partners. The ESP is ExactTarget. The content of the message below is in Swedish.

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