MainSleaze

Paperless Publishing, a new e-book publishing company, sent the attached advertisement to an old and long-closed personal email address. That email address has not been live since the early 2000s, and gets nothing but spam and an occasional misdirected personal email, which this clearly is not. The company spammed via one of the outbound customer SMTP smarthosts at GoDaddy, the domain registrar and hosting company where their domain is both registered and hosted.

GoDaddy, this customer probably purchased a list from a list seller who claimed that the list was opt-in. The customer sent this openly; they did not use any of the usual techniques to hide their identity or obtain plausible deniability. That suggests to me that the customer might not have known that purchasing lists and then sending bulk email to them is never acceptable. If you see this, it might be worthwhile to educate the customer in proper bulk email marketing techniques instead of simply terminating their account.

Paperless Publishing, if you see this, you need to stop sending bulk email to your list. You were scammed; there is no such thing as an opt-in list for sale. I suggest that you take some time and research email marketing and spam before trying to send bulk email again. It could save you a ruined reputation and a world of trouble. 🙂

Sending IP: 173.201.192.111

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from <xxx>.prod.phx3.secureserver.net (<xxx>.prod.phx3.secureserver.net [173.201.192.111])
	by <xxx> (Postfix) with SMTP id <xxx>
	for <xxx>; Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:xx:xx -0500 (CDT)
Received: (qmail 30045 invoked from network); 20 Oct 2011 18:xx:xx -0000
Received: from unknown (69.120.125.118)
  by <xxx>.prod.phx3.secureserver.net (173.201.192.111) with ESMTP; 
  20 Oct 2011 18:xx:xx -0000
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: "Paperless Publishing" <mk@paperlesspub.com>
To: <xxx>
Date: 20 Oct 2011 14:xx:xx -0400
Subject: New Online Publisher
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Readable Email:

From: Paperless Publishing <mk@paperlesspub.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: New Online Publisher

Let me first introduce myself, my name is Meghan Kilduff I am the Publisher of Paperless Publishing.

We are a new online Ebook Publishing and Conversion service company. We publish Ebook originals as well as help authors get their books on the top retail sites.

Please visit our site www.paperlesspub.com. Too date we have Published over 50 titles and by next year we hope to Publish close to 200.

Please feel free to contact me at mk@paperlesspub.com.

For Ebook conversion quotes please visit http://www.paperlesspub.com/equote.html.

Thanks,

Meghan Kilduff
Publisher
Paperless Publishing