Aug
30

Keekoo: Dodging a Bullet by Confirming a List

Keekoo, a U.S.-based members-only pregnancy and baby supplies service, today sent over a dozen bulk emails to my spamtraps. Keekoo appears to have bought another company, AllAboutTheBaby.com. Fortunately, Keekoo sent confirmation requests instead of welcome messages to that company’s list: users must respond to the messages to stay on the list. The ESP is IContact, which does not tolerate spam on its network and might well have advised Keekoo to confirm the list.

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Jul
14

GodVine: Emailing a Years-Dead Address that Subscribed this Week?

GodVine, a web portal for nondenominational Protestant Evangelical Christians that focuses on contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and videos, today sent an emailed newsletter to an email address that subscribed on Wednesday of this week. Problem is, the email address has not been live for many years; it is one of my spamtraps. The ESP is AWeber, a reputable email marketing firm with a reputation as a “white hat” — a good company that does not tolerate spam — in the antispam community.

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Apr
29

Broderbund: Why Confirming Subscriptions is Worthwhile

Several months after I first posted about spam from Broderbund, the company is still regularly sending bulk email advertisements to the same email address as before. Careful examination of the spamtrap indicates that it was probably never a valid email address. It receives no other email except botnet and other criminal types of spam, and the logon portion of the email address shows up regularly in dictionary attacks. The ESP is ExactTarget.

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Oct
29

Why Companies Shouldn’t Accept Unconfirmed Web Subscriptions

Super Hot Casino Games, an online gambling web site, is sending bulk email to <spamtrap@spambouncer.org>. Really. 🙂 That’s the old public spam reporting address at spambouncer.org, used mostly by users of the long-unmaintained SpamBouncer spam filtering program. That email address is probably in every decent suppression list and listwashing list on the planet. Super Hot Casino Games is obviously not validating subscriptions on their web site.

The ESP is BlueHornet, a subsidiary of ESP Digital River. Has BlueHornet abandoned all sanity checking on client email lists as well?

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