MainSleaze

Staffing company Virtual Telecare Inc., doing business as Appointment Guarantee, today offered virtual staffing services in the Philippines to every email address that ever existed at an American real estate brokerage. Unfortunately for Virtual Telecare, the company in question went bankrupt several years ago. The email was sent through SMTP relay service SMTP.com.

Smaller ESPs and SMTP relay services such as SMTP.com often have highly automated sign-up procedures. They do not do much vetting of customers before emailing for them, relying on high bounce rates, complaints, and blocklistings to warn them when a customer is spamming. Since many companies ignore best practices and spam purchased or email appended lists whenever they think they can get away with it, catching spamming customers after emailing for them results in poor reputation for the ESP or SMTP relay’s IP ranges.

The poor IP reputation persists despite many small ESPs and SMTP relay services (including SMTP.com) having solid anti-spam policies and good abuse desks. Increasingly, companies are unwilling to accept the significant amount of spam sent by new customers or customers who manage to avoid notice for their spamming. Such companies pre-emptively block or filter ESP and SMTP relay ranges, using narrow whitelists to avoid false positives.

Sending IP: 192.40.178.141

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from mailer141.gate178.sl.smtp.com (mailer141.gate178.sl.smtp.com [192.40.178.141])
        by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
        for <xxx>; Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:##:## -0500 (CDT)
X-MSFBL: <xxx>
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; d=smtp.com; s=smtpcomcustomers; c=relaxed/simple;
        q=dns/txt; i=@smtp.com; t=<xxx>;
        h=From:Subject:To:Date:MIME-Version:Content-Type;
        bh=<xxx>;
        b=<xxx>;
Received: from [64.134.130.233] ([64.134.130.233:<xxx>] helo=PCPC)
        by sl-mta05 (envelope-from <scott@appointmentguarantee.com>)
        (ecelerity 3.3.2.44647 r(44647)) with ESMTPA
        id <xxx>; Thu, 21 Aug 2014 17:##:## +0000
From: <scott@appointmentguarantee.com>
To: <scott@appointmentguarantee.com>
Subject: Appointment
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 10:##:## -0700
Message-ID: <xxx>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
        boundary="----=_NextPart_<xxx>"
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0
Thread-Index: <xxx>
Content-Language: en-us
X-SMTPCOM-Tracking-Number: <xxx>
X-SMTPCOM-Sender-ID: <xxx>
X-SMTPCOM-Spam-Policy: SMTP.com is a paid relay service. We do 
        not tolerate UCE of any kind. Please report it ASAP to 
        abuse@smtp.com

Readable Email:

From: scott@appointmentguarantee.com <scott@appointmentguarantee.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Appointment

Agent,

Appointment Guarantee is an American owned call center operating in the Philippines, offering insurance agents an amazing new appointment setting platform. We have been working in the insurance industry for over 7 years and we have a track record of proving that we can actually set the appointments. We will not over inflate expectations, we will not send you paid for unqualified leads, and we will insure that the appointments we set, will be in the area you serve.

<removed>

Scott Haken
Appointment Guarantee
1118 Hillview, Lahug
6000, Cebu City, Philippines

Office: 360-326-6410 (US)
Email: scott@appointmentguarantee.com

If you would like to be removed from our mailing list, then please send us an email at or reply this email and say “unsubscribe” or leave blank. /
Data Entry Reps / Email: scott@appointmentguarantee.com /
1118 Hillview Drive, Upper Salinas, Cebu City, Cebu 6000, Philippines