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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Dec
01

A Rather Disturbing Spam and Reminder From Childhood

Today I received a spam at one of my personal email addresses with the subject Public Records Report For, followed by a name that was decidedly not mine. I’m glad for that; had it been my name, I would have wondered just what else this sender knew about me or was telling others about me. 🙁 The sender was an entity named Archives.com, which I had never heard of previously but whose web site is amazingly similar to that of the much-better-known Ancestry.com. The ESP was EmailLabs (also known of as Lyris, Sparklist, and Uptilt).

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Jun
15

Las Malvinas Electro: Electronic Goods for Spamtraps

Argentinian electronics retailer Las Malvinas Electro just sent bulk email for the first time to an email address that has been closed for years, if it was ever active at all. The domain is active, and belongs to an American who does not speak Spanish and has no connection to Argentina or anywhere in South America. The ESP is Lyris, also known of as Uptilt and Emaillabs.

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Apr
25

Grupo Click: Teaching a Spamtrap How to Attract Women?

I don’t speak or read Portuguese, but it appears that Brazilian web sales portal Grupo Click na Boa is trying to sell some sort of cosmetic enhancement product to a (presumably male) spamtrap, promising that the women will flock around (him|it). In any event, Grupo Click is sending bulk email to an email address that was closed in 2002. Since this is a single spamtrap hit, and a quick look at the Grupo Click web site shows an aggressive attempt via popup to get visitors to leave their email addresses, I suspect that Grupo Click is collecting a lot of forged, falsified, or out-of-date email addresses from that web site and failing to confirm them before it adds them to a list. The ESP is Lyris.

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Mar
23

Why is Lyris Emailing for an Openly Opt-Out Mailer? :-(

An outfit that calls itself Informed Store, a marketer to third-party lists, is spamming spamtrap email addresses that did not opt in to their email or email from any other bulk sender. The email appears to have been sent on behalf of the Welsh government, and is partly in Welsh. The ESP is Lyris, also known of as Uptilt.

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Jan
01

Doctors Without Borders: Emailing an OLD List?

Doctors Without Borders (aka Médecins Sans Frontières or just MSF), a highly-respected medical charity that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, is sending bulk email to an email address that was closed in 2008. This email address has not received bulk email from MSF since it was re-enabled after its timeout period in early 2010. Since this is a single spamtrap hit, I suspect that MSF is mailing a very old list of donors after allowing it to remain uncontacted for years. MSF might also have purchased a list. The ESP is Lyris.

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Dec
12

Vivint: Selling Home Security to a Homeless… Spamtrap

Vivint, a company that develops and sells wireless home automation and home security systems, is sending bulk emails to an email address that as best I know never existed. The domain was a small domain and only one email address there normally receives any spam but pump’n’dump, botnet style pills, porn, and pirated goods. This isn’t that email address. The ESP is Lyris.

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Nov
20

VTech Kids: Welcoming a Spamtrap to the List

VTech Kids, a manufacturer of electronic learning products, is welcoming an email address that has never existed to its bulk email list. VTech Kids may not confirm web form subscriptions (which allows typoed and forged email addresses to be added to its list) or may have purchased a list. The ESP is Lyris, also known of as Uptilt.

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Nov
01

GuideStar: The Consequences of Bad Bounce Processing

GuideStar, a highly respected non-profit organization whose work is to collect information about and provide resources to other non-profit organizations, is still sending email to an email address that almost certainly did request that email — sometime in the late 1990s. The email address was closed and disabled in 2004, however, and was not re-enabled as a spamtrap until 2008. Four years of 500-level SMTP rejections failed to get it removed from GuideStar’s list. How much of that list now consists of old, dead email addresses? How much of it now consists of spamtraps? The ESP is fortunately Lyris, which actually cares about good list management and should be able to help GuideStar fix this problem.

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Oct
30

eCOST.com: Selling to a Long-Closed Email Address

Online discounter eCost.com is sending bulk email to an email address that was closed in 2007. There is no record of eCost.com contacting this email address since it finished its timeout period and was re-enabled in 2009. The ESP is Lyris, aka Uptilt.

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