Nov
03

SalsaLabs: Inviting Spamtraps to Seminars?

SalsaLabs, the ESP side of liberal U.S. political activist group Wired for Change, is mailing several email addresses that have not been live for many years, soliciting their attendance at a fundraising webinar (web-based seminar). It appears that SalsaLabs ignored bounces to email to their own list. However, you’d think that SalsaLabs would realize that none of these email addresses had responded to any emails in several years, since significantly before the last U.S. presidential campaign.

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Nov
03

Afri-Tech Technology spamming via ESP MailChimp

To be honest I’m still unsure how these guys got my corporate email address two (2) years ago and any sort of communications with them have gone un-answered. I’ve never been to any of their conferences and to be honest not sure I would ever go there.

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Nov
03

Fab.com spamming via ESP Sailthru

The “exclusive” seller of interior design stuff, Fab.com has a bit of a spam problem. Over the span of a month, an old and no longer used (but still “active”) address of mine has received not one, but six unsolicited bulk (and commercial) emails from the upscale interior design retailer.

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Nov
02

FIDO Friendly Magazine: Spamtraps have Dogs?

Fido Friendly Magazine, a magazine for people who travel with their dogs, is mailing an email address that has not been live for many years. The message says that the email address “recently registered” for offers. This is not true for any reasonable definition of the word “recently”; this email address has not been active since the mid-2000s. Either Fido Friendly is accepting unconfirmed web subscriptions and somebody typoed the email address and domain, or Fido Friendly purchased a list. The ESP is YesMail.

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Nov
02

Perfumaniacos.com: Emailing a Long-Closed Email Address

Perfumaniacos.com is mailing an email address that was closed in 2008, via ESP Emailvision. (: I mistakenly identified the ESP for this email as SendGrid. It is not; it is Emailvision. Thanks for the correction, Paul!) The web site for this sender has a poor rating in the Web-O-Trust reputation service, with messages indicating that it has suffered security breaches and been the source of spam.

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Nov
01

Hewlett Packard: Emailing a Long-Closed Email Address

Hewlett Packard is mailing an email address that was closed in 2007, and after its timeout period was re-enabled in 2009 as a spamtrap. The ESP is Acxiom Digital.

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Nov
01

SC Fuels: Purchased List? Sure Looks Like It….

SC Fuels, a national distributor of automotive fuel and home heating oil, is spamming an email address that was closed in 2002, at least a year before its own domain was registered. I see no way that an email address closed in 2002 and not re-enabled as a spamtrap til 2005 could be on this sender’s list except because of a typo combined with failure to confirm subscriptions, or a purchased list. The ESP is Constant Contact.

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Nov
01

Real Simple Magazine: Advertising People Magazine to a Spamtrap?

Real Simple magazine is spamming a second spamtrap, advertising a different magazine that I assume is part of the same group of magazines. The ESP, as before, is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.

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Nov
01

GuideStar: The Consequences of Bad Bounce Processing

GuideStar, a highly respected non-profit organization whose work is to collect information about and provide resources to other non-profit organizations, is still sending email to an email address that almost certainly did request that email — sometime in the late 1990s. The email address was closed and disabled in 2004, however, and was not re-enabled as a spamtrap until 2008. Four years of 500-level SMTP rejections failed to get it removed from GuideStar’s list. How much of that list now consists of old, dead email addresses? How much of it now consists of spamtraps? The ESP is fortunately Lyris, which actually cares about good list management and should be able to help GuideStar fix this problem.

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