MainSleaze

RunProfit.com, a company that offers (IMHO somewhat questionable) financial advice, is emailing several of my spamtraps every few days. RunProfit is also emailing Spamcop spamtraps; the sending IP is listed on the Spamcop blocklist. The domain is registered to “Butler Capital”, but this “Butler Capital” does not appear to be affiliated in any way with any of the better-known “Butler Capital” financial firms. The ESP is TotalSend.

Totalsend is a small African ESP that I have followed for the past few years. It provides bulk email services for small businesses, some legitimate, others not so much. It is competing in a difficult market dominated by established ESPs such as Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Vertical Response, and YourMailingListProvider, and (unfortunately) Topica.

Like Topica, TotalSend has some scummy customers. Like Topica, TotalSend faces considerable pressure to accept customers with poor mailing practices. I have seen non-trivial amounts of legitimate email from TotalSend, however, not just spam. TotalSend needs to crack down on its spamming customers, but I would not give up on it yet.

Sending IP: 196.45.113.176

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from mta001.fantasticsend.com (mta001.fantasticsend.com [196.45.113.176])
        by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
        for <xxx>; Tue, 12 Aug 2014 09:##:## +0300 (EEST)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 06:##:## +0000
To: <xxx>
From: RunProfit <newsletter@runprofit.com>
Reply-to: RunProfit <newsletter@runprofit.com>
Subject: This week's BUY - SELL !
Message-ID: <<xxx>@fantasticsend.com>
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: fantasticsend.com
X-Complaints-To: complaints@fantasticsend.com
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:<xxx>@bounce.fantasticsend.com>, <http://app.fantasticsend.com/u.php?<xxx>>
X-MessageID: <xxx>
X-Report-Abuse: <http://app.fantasticsend.com/report_abuse.php?<xxx>>
X-CampaignID: <xxx>
X-GroupID: <xxx>
X-SubscriberID: <xxx>
x-job: <xxx>
X-Campaign: True
X-Type: Campaign Email
Precedence: bulk
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"

Readable Email:

From: RunProfit <newsletter@runprofit.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: This week’s BUY – SELL !

The long and the short of it

This Week’s Buy – Sell

The latest RunProfit newsletter gives a brief summary of market developments, last week and this, before identifying two UK stocks, one of which we believe is an out-and-out buy, the other, in our view, a clear sell.

Read the full Newsletter… click here

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Any investment decisions taken are your own.  RunProfit is not liable for any loss or damage resulting from reliance on any information on our website or usage of any link available on our website or in material provided in any other form.

We urge you to use a variety of sources in reaching investment decisions and where necessary to take professional investment advice. Act with caution and exercise a healthy scepticism. There are sharks out there; we try to exclude them from our website but we cannot police every message and posting.

The views and opinions expressed on our website and in our material are merely the personal views and opinions of the authors. The information contained on our website and in our material is for information purposes only and is not intended to constitute any offer to sell or the invitation or solicitation of an offer to buy investment products or services and should not be relied upon in connection with any investment decision.

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