Viking River Cruises: Selling Travel to a Closed Role Address?
Viking River Cruises, a highly-rated cruise company, is sending bulk email advertisements to an email address that can’t have requested them since 2007, and probably never did. They sent this email via ESP Epsilon Interactive, also called Bigfoot Interactive.
The reason that I am fairly certain that this email address never subscribed to Viking River’s emails is that, when live, it was a contact address for a web site, not a personal email address. Such email addresses are called “role addresses” because they are assigned to a particular role, such as the webmaster or the contact person for the web site, rather than to a specific individual. Role addresses rarely send any sort of email themselves, and almost never subscribe to receive any sort of bulk email. Most list management sanity checking procedures look for them as signs that a list is dirty. (In this case, the role address had a non-standard name, or I would wonder why the ESP missed it.)
Sending IP: 208.70.142.177
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from dmx1.bfi0.com (dmailer0177.dmx1.bfi0.com [208.70.142.177])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id 25FCE7C0137
for <xxx>; Mon, 31 Oct 2011 03:xx:xx -0500 (CDT)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
Reply-To: Viking River Cruises <Viking_River_Cruises@emails.vikingrivercruises.com>
Bounces_to: bounce.<xxx>@emails.vikingrivercruises.com
Message-ID: <<xxx>@emails.vikingrivercruises.com>
X-SS: <xxx>
X-BFI: <xxx>
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:xx:xx EDT
From: Viking River Cruises <Viking_River_Cruises@emails.vikingrivercruises.com>
Subject: Book a 2012 Cruise Today and Save!
To: <xxx>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="<xxx>"
Readable Email:
From: Viking River Cruises <Viking_River_Cruises@emails.vikingrivercruises.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Book a 2012 Cruise Today and Save!
Reply-To: Viking River Cruises <Viking_River_Cruises@emails.vikingrivercruises.com>
Visit the link below in your web browser if you are having trouble reading this email from Viking River Cruises. (Link: http://emails.vikingrivercruises.com/<xxx>)
Visit the link below to unsubscribe from Viking River Cruises. (Link:
http://emails.vikingrivercruises.com/<xxx>)
5700 Canoga Avenue, Suite 200, Woodland Hills, California 91367
1-800-707-8697
Advertisement CST:<xxx>
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