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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Jan
18

Coldwater Creek: Spamming a Purchased or Email Appended List

Today clothing retailer Coldwater Creek emailed about a dozen spamtraps with a sales announcement. About a third of those spamtraps were probable typos. Several others were repurposed spamtraps, some of them not live for well over a decade. One was a pristine spamtrap at a domain that has never had a legitimate email address. The ESP was the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SMC), previously known of as ExactTarget.

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Jan
09

Finnair: Massive failure in personal data processing

During the evening (Finnish time, UTC+0200) of January 8, 2015, Finland’s national airline, Finnair (www, biz reg) launched an unprecedented email advertising campaign at their valued customer list.

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Aug
06

Hotels.com: Emailing Typos, *Not* Emailing Those who Asked

Hotels.com, a large travel booking web service, has been emailing a few dozen of my spamtraps regularly. I took a closer look this morning at just which spamtraps they are emailing, and found that every single one of them was an obvious typo. The ESP is ExactTarget, a division of marketing giant Salesforce.com.

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Jul
03

Beach Cove Resort: Emailing 10+ Year old List? Or Purchased List?

Today vacation advertiser Vacation Myrtle Beach sent spam advertising one of their properties (“Beach Cove Resort”) to a number of spamtraps. If these spamtraps were ever live, they were closed over ten years ago. One is almost certainly a pristine spamtrap, and not one that was likely created through a typo. (The spamtrap domain belonged to an ISP.) In other words, this sender is sending to a list that might be old and very poorly maintained, but contains indications of having been purchased or email appended. The ESP is ExactTarget, a subsidiary of Salesforce.com.

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Jan
15

Carwash.com: Spamming a Decade-Closed Email Address

Some outfit that I have never heard of before, PC&D B2B Trade Group™ aka Carwash.com, started sending bulk email advertisements last week to an old email address of mine that was retired over a decade ago. Carwash.com is part of EBSCO Publishing. The ESP is ExactTarget.

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Dec
07

Cabelas: One Year and an ESP Move Later, Hitting the Same Spamtrap

Outdoor goods retailer and outfitter Cabelas, about whom I first blogged in January, just sent a bulk email to the same spamtrap after a hiatus of several months. Previously Cabelas handled its own bulk email. It has now moved its bulk email operation to ESP ExactTarget.

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Nov
14

“The Tea Party”: Spamming a Shiny Brand New Spamtrap *after* the Election

An organization that I did not see or hear from during the recent U.S. Presidential election campaign, The Tea Party, began sending email a couple of days after the election to a brand new shiny spamtrap at a domain that I have owned for some time. This spamtrap has not previously received email from anybody: I enabled it last week after I reviewed my mail logs and noticed that somebody was trying to send email to it. The IP that sent this email belongs to ESP Sendgrid. The domain that sent this email, pd25.com, belongs to what I thought was a rival ESP, ExactTarget. The authorized use policies (AUP) of both ESPs decidedly require that bulk email sent through them be sent only to email addresses that opted in.

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Nov
13

Woolrich: Fine Winter Woolens… for a Spamtrap

U.S. woolen manufacturer Woolrich, which has been in operation since the early 1800s, just started sending bulk email advertisements to an email address that never existed at a domain that has not been live for over seven years. The ESP is ExactTarget.

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