May
12

Join Netflix today

Recently, a friend encouraged me to look into the marketing of Netflix, the video-on-demand platform.

They’re sending from Amazon SES, one of the ESPs we are tracking, so I might have materials to look at.

My notes on ESP spam go back years, so I can easily pull up the data and draw a graph of the percentage of mail related to netflix.com in the observed output of Amazon SES in our traps.

I’d say somebody has got a little over excited with the remarketing. My favourites are the “Join today!” emails sent to addresses that never existed, where the explanation for why the recipient got it is that they had previously created an account. Why do they need to join in a second time and how were they able to join to begin with, with an email address that has never existed?

Feb
24

January 2015 ESP Spam: Some Notes….

I see that Atro Tossavainen graphed the spam that we saw in January. Atro and I manage a substantial spamtrap collection together, so I have seen what he posted about. Nothing there surprised me except the hugely disproportionate amount of spam Topica sends to our spamtraps. I’ve blogged twice about Topica, and in the last blog recommended blocking their /22 because of the amounts of spam and probability that little or no non-spam email is sent from them any more. However, I did not realize that we were seeing twice as much spam from Topica as from ExactTarget, which sends several orders of magnitude more email than they do.

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Feb
06

When Users Really DO NOT Want Your Email….

As I was looking through today’s crop of ESP-sent, mostly mainsleaze spam, I kept stumbling across spam sent to some of my most amusing spamtraps. These spamtraps are not typotraps so much as obvious forgeries, the sort of thing that users type when they are asked for an email address, do not want to refuse, and yet do not want to receive email from you either. Any company might have one of these on their list, but I found several companies and a number of ESPs sending to several of these obvious forgeries. Today. In the past 24 hours.

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Jul
06

HireBlast: Blasting Job Offers to a Typoed Email Address

HireBlast, a job information site, has been emailing job offers to one of my spamtraps for a few weeks. These emails are sent through Amazon’s Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), which functions as both an ESP and an SMTP relay service.

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Feb
16

Markkinointirekisteri.fi on Amazon SES

After their recent ejection off SendGrid, Suomen Markkinointirekisteri Oy (www, biz reg) are now trying their luck with Amazon’s cloud services.

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