MAIF, a French insurance company, is spamming an email address that has never existed at all. This email address is present on many lists for sale in countries whose primary languages are French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and receives a good deal of spam from otherwise legitimate companies in those languages. Their ESP is Mail Advantage, a subsidiary of CheetahMail, a subsidiary of Experian.
Real Simple magazine is spamming a second spamtrap, advertising a different magazine that I assume is part of the same group of magazines. The ESP, as before, is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.
Three weeks later, AT&T spammed the same spamtrap it did earlier again, pushing it to buy AT&T’s U*Verse service. The spamtrap in question is a “pure spamtrap”, that is, an email address that never existed at all. The ESP is still Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.
Wyndham hotels and resorts is continuing to send offers to the old, long-closed email address that I blogged about a few weeks ago. In addition, it is now hitting another similar email address. :/ The ESP is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.
Integrated solar photovoltaics construction company Onyx Solar, a company whose field fascinates me and whose mailings I could have seen myself asking for, is spamming role addresses (email addresses assigned to a role, such as sales or webmaster, instead of a person) and other email addresses that were scraped from old web pages. They are using FAGMS.de, a subsidiary of ESP Cheetahmail, itself a subsidiary of Experian. This isn’t a list of addresses that I would expect a legitimate company to be sending bulk email to, or an ESP not to have immediately caught as dirty. What happened?
AT&T is spamming the purest sort of spamtrap — an email address at a domain that has never had a legitimate email address at all — via ESP Cheetahmail (i.e. Experian). AT&T really should confirm opt-ins, or perhaps should prevent its marketing department from purchasing lists?
This morning I have been looking through my spamtrap collector for mainsleaze spam to report here, to get this blog started. After listing a couple of spams, I looked at the last few spam reports. With one exception, they’re all from Cheetahmail (Experian).
So I just searched the last week’s worth of spam in my spamtrap collector for any spam from IP ranges that I know belong to CheetahMail. In addition to the four spam reports so far, in the past week one or more of my spamtraps have received the following mainsleaze spam from Cheetahmail:
Radio Shack is spamming a years-dead email address via (surprise!) Cheetahmail (i.e. Experian), thanking the user for subscribing. :/ Radio Shack appears to have purchased a list. So much for their NO SPAM policy….
Wyndham hotels and resorts is sending offers to an OLD email address. Cheetahmail (i.e. Experian) is sending me a lot of spam.
Real Simple magazine is mailing via Cheetahmail (a subsidiary of Experian), and is hitting an email address that has not been live since the mid 2000s.