House Party: Why Reactivating Old Lists is a BAAAAAADDD Idea
House Party, a US-based organizer of “sales parties” in which individuals invite friends and family into their homes and try to sell them stuff, is sending bulk email to an email address that was closed in 2008. In this case, the spam apparently occurred because the sender had a fallow list of email addresses for people who at one time were involved with them, or (more likely) obtained a list (or lists) of email addresses from one or more of the companies for which they arrange “house parties”. In either case, they acted with reckless disregard of the near-certainty than some of the email addresses were long-closed, or no longer interested in hearing from them. The sending ESP is PulsePoint.
Sending IP: 69.56.40.129
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from mail1.communicate.houseparty.com (mail1.communicate.houseparty.com [69.56.40.129])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Fri, 6 Jan 2012 09:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
Received: by mail1.communicate.houseparty.com id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Fri, 6 Jan 2012 09:01:41 -0600
(envelope-from <bounce-<xxx>@communicate.houseparty.com>)
From: House Party <info@communicate.houseparty.com>
Reply-To: House Party <r-<xxx>@communicate.houseparty.com>
To: "House Partier" <xxx>
Message-ID: <<xxx>.JavaMail.root@communicate.houseparty.com>
Subject: Welcome back to House Party
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-HOUSE: <xxx>
list-unsubscribe: <mailto:unsub-<xxx>@communicate.houseparty.com>
X-PVIQ: <xxx>
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2012 09:xx:xx -0600
Readable Email:
From: House Party <info@communicate.houseparty.com>
To: “House Partier” <spamtrap>
Subject: Welcome back to House Party
Reply-To: House Party <r-<xxx>@communicate.houseparty.com>
You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for the House Party mailing list and to be notified about upcoming events. You can unsubscribe immediately from this list by following this link.
At some point in your web searching you stumbled upon and registered for House Party, an awesome site that gives you the opportunity to have parties in your home around products you love. Somehow we lost touch for a while, but we're glad that you're back and we can’t wait to introduce=
you to all the great parties you can host and share with your friends.
<removed>
2012 House Party, Inc. All rights reserved. &n=
bsp; One Bridge Street #3, Irvington, NY 10533
House Party spammed another different email address late yesterday. If they continue “adding” non-opted-in email addresses to their list, sooner or later they will spam some spamtraps that belong to an organization that does something a bit more authoritative with the information than blog about it, if you (and hopefully they) get my drift.
My deliverability team is working with HouseParty on this issue. Was the message you received last night another reactivation / passive permission pass sounding message or something different? Thanks
Damian
I just checked. I’ve actually seen several emails from them in the past few days. Some have been reactivation messages; others appear to be welcoming people to a new newsletter.
House Party works diligently to maintain the highest standards in email practices and we work to update our records through houseparty.com and other outlets. This list was not purchased or borrowed from anyone and we regret that we seem to have somehow included bad addresses. We truly respect our consumers’ inboxes and will not be emailing this list at all anymore.
House Party generates millions of consumer conversations and recommendations, online and off, through our passionate community of social influencers, proprietary digital platform and memorable in-home events for the world’s best-loved brands. To find out more, visit houseparty.com or feel free to contact us.
If you didn’t obtain these from a purchased list, and didn’t reactivate some very old lists, then how did spamtraps come to be on your list?
Spamtrap email addresses don’t belong to real people. They don’t sign up on web sites, at houseparty.com or anywhere else. They don’t participate in “consumer conversations and recommendations”, online or off. “Social influencers” (whatever that might mean) don’t use spamtraps; they use real email addresses. So none of the examples you gave of how you obtain email addresses for your lists would apply in the case of spamtraps.
I’d suggest that you do some more research. Your company may not have a policy of purchasing lists, but in my experience it is not uncommon for somebody in a company marketing department to violate policy against list purchases under the belief that they can help the company’s bottom line by doing so. In addition, some companies reactivate old lists that have not been contacted for years, or attempt to mail to suppressed email addresses.
Any of those possibilities could have caused what I saw. House Party needs to determine which of them caused spam to be sent to spamtraps and fix that problem before it ends up in worse trouble than with a complaint on the Mainsleaze Spam Blog.