Faithful America, an organization of religious people who support progressive causes, is spamming an email address that was turned into a spamtrap about a year ago after rejecting email at SMTP time for over eighteen months. Their ESP is SalsaLabs, aka Wired for Change.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), an organization affiliated with the U.S. Democratic political party, is spamming email addresses that have been closed for years, and in the interim bounced email at SMTP time with a 500-level rejection for over twelve consecutive months. In other words, these email addresses are spamtraps. If the DCCC continues to send bulk email to them in the quantities that I am seeing, they are likely to end up in trouble with anti-spam blacklists.
Before Charles blogged about the spam he had received from Herman Cain’s campaign this morning, he emailed me and asked if political spam qualified for mention on the blog. The answer was “yes”, qualified only by the requirement that the spam be from the sender’s own IPs or sent via a legitimate ESP. On thinking about this, I realized that a public policy statement might be in order.
Today I received spam promoting the candidacy of US presidential candidate Herman Cain. I have no idea how I came to be on their email list. I don’t subscribe to political mailings and I’m very careful to try to avoid giving any personal information to companies or organizations that I think might sell my address to anyone else, getting me even more unwanted mail.
Social networking site LinkedIn is sending invitations to join both to email addresses that never existed and email addresses that might have existed many years ago but not in the past few years. LinkedIn does not appear to do any vetting of email addresses that its users provide to it, leading it to send invitation emails to many spamtraps on a regular basis. It then sends reminders about email that was unsolicited in the first place.
ThinPrint, a brand of Cortado AG, is spamming addresses they know to be dead for two plus years via their own IPs.
The Canadian branch of Kraft Foods, Kraft Canada, is spamming several email addresses that either never existed or have been closed for several years, with the usual intervening twelve months or more of bouncing all email at SMTP time. Their ESP is Epsilon Interactive.