Neiman Marcus, a high-end U.S. department store, just emailed a number of spamtraps. The Subject header asks for them to confirm their email address. The message body thanks them for having confirmed their email address. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a division of Experian.
Piarmainos.com, a Finnish printing and packaging company, is hitting a few spamtraps that have not been live email addresses for over five years. The ESP is Streamsend.
Transportation management consulting company Ahern & Associates, which provides expert advice on the trucking industry in the United States, is emailing weekly newsletters to several spamtraps. The ESP is Pinpointe.
The Washington Post, one of the major newspapers in the U.S., just started emailing advertisements to the email addresses of people who have accounts there to comment. I was foolish, and provided my usual blog commenting email address instead of a tagged address that I could turn off if needed. :/ I unsubscribed, and also sent email to their ESP E-Dialog (now eBay). The unwanted advertising emails have continued. I want to warn users that either the Washington Post is ignoring unsubscribes or E-Dialog’s unsubscribe system is unconscionably slow despite having (twice now) confirmed that my email address was removed.
GroupOn, the massive social media site which has sent surprisingly little spam for the past year, is now hitting an email address that was shut down before 2005. GroupOn sent the email through their own IP range; no ESP was involved.
P. R. Paige, who has written a “romantic comedy” (his term) about male infidelity, is emailing advertisements for that book to a very dirty purchased list. Mr. Paige’s spam just barely qualifies as Mainsleaze, but it was sent through ESP Constant Contact.
HireBlast, a job information site, has been emailing job offers to one of my spamtraps for a few weeks. These emails are sent through Amazon’s Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), which functions as both an ESP and an SMTP relay service.
Secure America Now, a political web site whose splash page promotes the impeachment of U.S. President Barack Obama, just emailed a spamtrap email address at a former European ISP. The email address has not been live for several years, and formerly belonged to a citizen of that country who had no ties to the United States. The email was sent through NationBuilder, a “community organizer” that uses ESP Sendgrid.
Today Buckaroo emailed a list of scraped or purchased email addresses advertising its services and requesting the recipients to “claim their Buckaroo Account”. The email addresses that they emailed have not been live for more than ten years, if they ever existed. It appears that Buckaroo scraped old web-based business registries or similar sources of data, or purchased a list from somebody who did. The ESP is Puresend.