Oct
18
Better Homes & Gardens: Emailing a Spamtrap
Iconic U.S. magazine Better Homes & Gardens is spamming an email address that appears to have never existed at all via ESP Epsilon Interactive.
Oct
18
(RESOLVED) Canal Plus newsletter: no bounce processing, not respecting opt-out, not responding to complaints
Canal Plus Finland, a brand name of the Swedish-based C More Entertainment Ab, a provider of premium TV services, is spamming addresses they know to be dead for two plus years via Basefarm Ab, a Swedish provider of Internet services.
Oct
17
Cruising With the Stars
Celebrity Cruises wants my mum to cruise with them. Funny, because she never asked to be on their list. (She hates boats.) The ESP was ExactTarget.
Oct
17
Who is Bon-Ton?
Bon-Ton is a chain of department stores, according to Google. I’m not familiar with them. There are definitely no Bon-Ton stores in the city I live in. I’ve never purchased anything from them, online or in store. Yet, they sent me this email via ESP CheetahMail. I smell an email append; this particular spamtrap seems to get personalized spam where people think this address is some other person, based on a faulty database match of some sort.
I personally will not be accepting any more mail from 8.7.42.227, except to report it to various blocklist groups.
Oct
15
SmartZip Analytics: Helping a Spamtrap Sell Real Estate
Business intelligence and analysis company SmartZip Analytics wants to help a spamtrap sell real estate. Or maybe they just purchased a list that had one of my spamtraps on it? In any event, SmartZip sent the following bulk email to one of my spamtraps today via ESP Marketo.
Oct
14
Topps: Spamming Purchased Lists
Apparently the online store for Topps, the famed chewing gum and baseball cards company, wants spamtraps to buy their products. Or so I would surmise after over two dozen spamtraps at several spamtrap domains received their latest advertisement. Unusually for mainsleaze spam, these advertisement emails were sent directly from Topps’ own IPs.
Oct
14
TheRealDeal.com: Emailing Long-Dead Email Addresses
The Real Deal, a commercial real estate magazine, spammed several email addresses that had not been live for several years, and that after being re-enabled rejected all email at SMTP time for over twelve consecutive months. They used the ESP MadMimi to send their spam. The Real Deal probably purchased a list, and failed to inform MadMimi of that fact since MadMimi’s AUP/TOS forbids purchased lists.
NOTE: MadMimi’s bulk emails are normally sent from a domain with the name mimimail#.com, where # stands for a one- or two-digit number. Tagged URLs in their emails use the hosts mim.io and go.madmimi.com.
Oct
12
Sendloop: Maybe not ignoring complaints completely after all
Sendloop.com, a Turkish ESP (a d/b/a of Oktet Bilisim Ltd), provides services to a group of Finnish spammers sending mail to addresses that have been dead for two years plus and ignores complaints.