MainSleaze

I’ve recently laid my hands on a bunch of what I think are pretty fantastic spamtraps. A group of domains that used to belong to a startup at the turn of the millennium, sold for $A_LOT to a big player who didn’t know what to do with it and folded it in 2002. The domains haven’t been in any use since. You think a year’s timeout ought to do it? So do I.

But clearly the point of how long is adequate is moot when there’s such an awful lot of folks out there, major players and big-name international ESPs too, who just don’t process bounces at all. Even including members of the organisation that wrote the book on mailing list management.

Or how else would you explain the fact that they continue to hit addresses ten years after their demise?

The services folded in 2002. The domains had some kind of a presence until early 2003, and nothing at all, probably not even DNS, for the rest of 2003, all of 2004-2006, and only a token presence from a predecessor of the current operation from late 2007 on, but still, no mail. Until now, that is. The first day of MTA operation yielded about 30,000 unique emails to which mail was offered. Some estimates I’ve seen suggest the service had to the tune of 5M users in its heyday.