Kate Bosworth Welcomes Me With Spam
Long, long ago I registered an email address on the San Jose Mercury News website for some reason or other. Today, somebody called the Twin Cities Pioneer Press is sending mail to me at the address I gave only to the Mercury News. Was my email address stolen or sold? No, probably not. A quick investigation reveals that both newspapers are owned by the same company, MediaNews Group. Was it spam? Most definitely! Somebody I didn’t give my email address to (Pioneer Press) is sending me mail to an address that I gave to some other company (or in this case, sister company). It may or may not be legal, but it is most certainly a bad practice.
This came from an IP range registered to MediaNews Group. The “parent” of this IP space is registered to an ESP called Skylist. It is unclear to me if Skylist provides service to this company or not. I don’t know enough about how these type of IP range registrations work.
Source IP: 96.46.128.55.
Received: from mail3.mail.twincities.com (mail3.mail.twincities.com [96.46.128.55]) by x.x (Postfix) with ESMTP id x <x@x>; Tue, 29 Nov 2011 xx:xx:xx -0600 (CST) Received: by mail3.mail.twincities.com id x for <x@x.com>; Tue, 29 Nov 2011 x:x:x -0600 (envelope-from <bounce-x@mail.twincities.com>) From: Twin Cities Pioneer Press <newsletters@mail.twincities.com> To: x <x@x> Subject: Kate Bosworth welcomes you to your own personal celebrity style experience. Half off your first piece MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-MNGI: x list-unsubscribe: <mailto:unsub-x@mail.twincities.com> Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 x:x:x -0600
I run the professional services and deliverability consulting for PulsePoint (formerly Skylist). Media News Group is our client and uses our ESP platform to manage their email program. Overall they have an excellent program and are a very responsible sender. This mailing was sent to the wrong list by one of their email managers. It was intended for a small, local list in the Twin Cities area. Complete human error that they caught and brought to our attention immediately. We were able to stop the mailing from going tout completely, but it did get sent out to part of the list before we were notified of the issue. We are working with them to figure out how it happened and how we can help them prevent it from happening in the future. Happy to provide more info on the event.
Thanks for responding, omenkid.
Several of my spamtraps were also hit by this particular mailing. In addition, an antispammer I know and trust (other than Charles) also had a personal email address hit by this spam. I also have an email address signed up with the San Jose Mercury News, however, and it did not receive this spam. I would also be interested in knowing at which point this mailing was halted, and if it went out in alphabetical or some other order.
I searched my spamtrap archives, and can verify that my spamtraps have not been hit in the past three months by this IP or any MediaNews Group sender that I could identify. I could check for the past year, but that would require unarchiving a great deal of spam.
If I don’t see additional spam from MediaNews Group, I would tend to write this off as a one-time error, albeit an especially annoying one.
Unfortunately about 70% of the list had been deployed by the time that we were alerted and able to stop it. The sending order looks pretty random to everyone but our platform (It is tied to an internal identifier that is assigned to each record). As I mentioned above, from everything we have seen over the past 4 years, MNG is a very responsible sender and they are not taking this erroneous send lightly. We have already taken steps with them to help prevent a recurrence of this mistake.
By the way, I think the blog is great and it is providing valuable information to the industry. Definitely hoping that we don’t see many of our clients mentioned here anytime soon.
Damian Borichevsky
VP, Professional Services
PulsePoint
I’m glad that this is helpful to you. If you’d like, you can post here or send to me privately (at mainsleaze @ spambouncer dot org) a list of your IPs, and I’ll stick them in the ESP monitoring filter on my spamtrap collector. In addition to the stuff I blog about, I could also send you private notes if I notice something. I do this for several ESP reps who have asked. I won’t divulge the identities of my spamtraps, but I can and will name specific IPs that are hitting traps, give you a day or even an hour when I saw the spam, etc. upon request.
As others might also have indicated, I do understand the difference between “this email was sent to this one spamtrap” and “this sender is spamming”. <G> Often I blog about individual spamtrap hits because a single reported spamtrap hit combined with other information from other people can reveal a problem. However, unless there is some compelling bit of information proving that the single spamtrap hit could only be deliberate spam (a *very* rare occurrence), I don’t expect the ESP to halt all customer mailings for that customer and do the whole fire drill. Most of the single spamtrap hits are simply indications that a customer’s list bears watching for indications that it might benefit from cleaning or a re-engagement campaign.
Thanks for letting us know what happened here, Damian.
BTW, I just tweaked the tags on this blog to point, not to Skylist (which is an old name), but to PulsePoint and its corporate head, Datran Media. This will allow Damian and anybody else to pull all blogs about PulsePoint up by clicking one link. (You can do the same with any other ESP mentioned here, by clicking the tag with that ESP’s name.)