Alurium, Inc., a cloud computing and web hosting company, sent a bulk email advertisement for a webinar to a number of spamtraps today. None of these spamtraps had ever heard from Alurium before, at least not since exiting their timeout periods and being turned into spamtraps. The ESP is Sendgrid.
Upromise, a college funding program operated by U.S. financial services company Sallie Mae, today sent a “membership notice” to a spamtrap email address that has never before heard from either Upromise or Sallie Mae. I have seen a great deal of spam for loan offers and college financial assistance to that spamtrap, which appears to have been placed on a (likely e-pended) list supposedly targeted at would-be college students and sold to all and sundry. :/ The ESP is Acxiom Digital.
Weight Watchers, a decades-old U.S.-based organization that helps those who want to loose weight, just started sending bulk email newsletters to a spamtrap email address that has never heard from the organization before. The email address in question, when live, was a role address for a small company, not a personal address. The email address does not appear likely to be the result of a typo. So I am wondering how it came to be on Weight Watchers’ list? The ESP is Epsilon Interactive, via its subsidiary Bigfoot Interactive.
AppyMail, a marketer of mobile apps, recently began to send its newsletter to an email address that was closed years before mobile apps or the mobile web existed. I’m not sure why, but the email address is not a likely candidate for a typo. The ESP is PulsePoint.
An outfit that calls itself Informed Store, a marketer to third-party lists, is spamming spamtrap email addresses that did not opt in to their email or email from any other bulk sender. The email appears to have been sent on behalf of the Welsh government, and is partly in Welsh. The ESP is Lyris, also known of as Uptilt.
U.S. grocer Safeway is suddenly sending bulk email advertisements to an email address that been closed since at least 2007. This email address has not previously received email from Safeway since it completed its timeout period and was re-enabled as a spamtrap. Either somebody made a typo when subscribing to receive Safeway offers (unlikely in this case), Safeway reactivated a VERY old list that they had not contacted for years, or Safeway purchased a list. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.
Sometime last week Sony Mobile, the cell phone subsidiary of Sony Corporation, started spamming several of my spamtraps, some of them email addresses that have been closed for years, and some email addressees that never existed at all. The spam dribbled out, two or three per day, until today. Today they hit over two dozen spamtraps that they had not emailed previously. Their ESP is Acxiom Digital.
Either St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, or San Antonio printer Accu-Print, is sending bulk email advertisements to a spamtrap of mine that has never heard from either of them before. The From header say’s that the sender is St. Mary’s, while the message body states that the message was sent by Accu-Print. The spamtrap in question, if it ever existed at all, was closed in 2005. The ESP is ExactTarget.