Vintage U.S. candy maker Necco® set bulk email advertisements to two spamtrap addresses in the past 36 hours. The spamtraps might have been legitimate email addresses at one time, but not after 2005. Despite this, the email claims that these email addresses “recently registered with a network site to receive special online offers.” This is not true for any reasonable definition of “recent”. The ESP is Yesmail, a subsidiary of Infogroup.
Atenga, a consulting firm that teaches businesses how to set prices for their products and services to maximize profits, today sent a bulk advertising email to a spamtrap that closed in 2004. The spamtrap has not previously received email from Atenga. Was this a typoed subscription, or a purchased list? The ESP is Sendgrid.
Last November I blogged about a spamtrap hit by Peebles, a U.S.-based retailer of clothing and accessories. Today Peebles hit that spamtrap again with an email that just *might* be an opt-in confirmation, although the language does not make that clear. The ESP is CheetahMail, a division of Experian.
Budget Mobile, a French mobile phone service, today sent a bulk email advertisement to an email address that has not been live for a couple of years. The email appeared to lack an unsubscribe option, although my French is rudimentary and I did not want to retrieve images to check whether it was included in them. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.
Concord Music Group (CMG), a studio that produces and markets many styles of music, sent a bulk advertising email to a spamtrap earlier today, announcing the release of a music video by one of its jazz performers. CMG has not sent any type of email to this spamtrap (or any of my spamtraps) previously. If the spamtrap in question was ever a live email address, it was closed before 2006. The ESP is ExactTarget.
The old Military Industrial Buyer’s Guide spammers that I blogged about back in November 2011 are back under new domains (dodsupplier.com and dodworld.com) and slightly modified name (Federal Buyer’s Guide). Their ESP is still SendGrid.
Pixel Designz, a custom web site design firm, is sending email advertisements to two spamtraps, neither of which has been live since before 2006. Neither spamtrap has received email from this company since exiting their timeout period and being turned into spamtraps. Since the domain pixeldesignz.com was created in 2010, neither of these email addresses could have subscribed to this company’s list when they were live. The only explanations I can come up with for this are two separate typoed email addresses (not likely) or a purchased list. The ESP is Sendgrid.
This week I’m providing a new type of spam report. It consists of a table that lists company names, the number of spams that they have sent to my spamtrap email addresses in the previous week, and the number of spamtrap email addresses that they’ve mailed. I am including only spam that is sent to those email addresses for which I accept delivery (perhaps 5% of total delivery attempts) and am excluding spam sent to any email address at a domain that is known to belong to me.
Mail-order women’s clothing retailer Chadwicks of Boston is sending bulk email advertisements to a spamtrap email address that was closed in 2004. The ESP is Yesmail, a subsidiary of Infogroup.
Iolo Technologies, a software company whose products optimize Microsoft Windows systems, is sending bulk email to an email address that was closed in 2007, claiming that it subscribed to their list a couple of weeks ago. The ESP is BlueHornet, a division of Digital River.