Jul
03

Beach Cove Resort: Emailing 10+ Year old List? Or Purchased List?

Today vacation advertiser Vacation Myrtle Beach sent spam advertising one of their properties (“Beach Cove Resort”) to a number of spamtraps. If these spamtraps were ever live, they were closed over ten years ago. One is almost certainly a pristine spamtrap, and not one that was likely created through a typo. (The spamtrap domain belonged to an ISP.) In other words, this sender is sending to a list that might be old and very poorly maintained, but contains indications of having been purchased or email appended. The ESP is ExactTarget, a subsidiary of Salesforce.com.

Read more…

Jan
19

QVC: Verifying Email Addresses that Never Responded to Email

Today video and e-commerce retailer QVC sent what appears to be a re-engagement or verification email to a pristine spamtrap. The spamtrap probably got onto QVC’s list because the user typoed the real email address when subscribing. The email indicates that the user has not responded to emails “recently”, and asks for the user to indicate whether they want to stay on QVC’s list. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a subsidiary of Experian.

Read more…

Jan
18

Target Spams Email Appended List with Data Breach Notice

U.S.-based retailer Target, which recently suffered a massive data breach, has responded to that breach by hiring an email appender to append scraped email addresses (some of them closed for over a decade) to their customer list. Target then spammed that appended list over the past few days. The ESP is Epsilon, via its subsidiary Bigfoot Interactive.

Read more…

Dec
09

Canada Announces Go-Live Date for CASL Anti-Spam Law

In early December 2013 the Canadian government announced that the 2010 Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) will go into effect on July 1, 2014. Although this law covers considerably more ground than just unsolicited bulk email (spam), it is very good news for those who fight spam, and especially good news for those of us who fight spam by otherwise legitimate companies. The reason? CASL requires (with some limited exceptions) that recipients of bulk email give explicit consent to receive the email before it is sent. In other words, CASL requires opt-in. Unlike the U.S. CAN-SPAM law and many other laws in many other countries, CASL actually forbids most spam.

CASL also has teeth. Violations of the CASL opt-in requirement can draw fines as high as $10 million Canadian per infringing email. By all appearances, the Canadian government agencies responsible for enforcement of CASL are prepared to enforce the law vigorously.

Read more…

Dec
07

NASA JPL: When the Same Email is Both Solicited and Spam (Take #2)

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) sent me a solicited, much-desired, and eagerly read bulk email today. The organization also spammed a half dozen email addresses at domains that closed in 2005 and earlier. I don’t doubt that the original owners of those email addresses subscribed, probably sometime in the 1990s. Email addresses (unlike diamonds) are not forever. The ESP is IContact.

Read more…

Dec
06

The 1776 Coalition: Spamming a Decade-Closed Spamtrap

The 1776 Coalition, which appears on the face of things to be a Tea Party-affiliated conservative action group but whose focus is on marketing rather than politics, today spammed an email address that was closed in 2005. The email claims that the email address was added to their list on August 26, 2013. Either a malicious subscriber put this email address into the web form on this organization’s web site, and the organization failed to validate and confirm the email address before adding it to their list, or the organization is using a purchased or other third-party list. The ESP is BlueHornet, a division of Digital River.

Read more…

Nov
08

Eloqua and Marketo Partner with List Seller/Email Appender NetProspex

Apparently ESPs Eloqua and Marketo are partnering with a list seller and email appender, NetProspex. NetProspex is not unknown to me or others who are active in email abuse issues. Among other accomplishments, NetProspex has managed to attain a listing in the Spamhaus Project’s ROKSO, their list of the “worst of the worst” spammers. Laura Atkins at Word to the Wise, a well-known email deliverability expert, blogged about NetProspex a few years ago. Nothing I know suggests that her blog is in any way out of date.

Read more…

Oct
27

The DMA: Spamming Job Services to a Purchased List

The United States’ Direct Marketing Association (or DMA) spammed what appears to have been a purchased list yesterday morning. The email claims that the recipients of the email had expressed interest in the DMA, but it was sent to email addresses that never existed and were not likely typos. The ESP is Yesmail, a division of information broker Infogroup.

Read more…

May
17

Patriot Action Network and Ning: Social Network Spam to a Non-Member

Ning, a social networking service intended primarily for entertainers who want to manage fan networks but now used by political and activist organizations as well, just sent a bulk email to an email address that has never existed. The Ning user that sent the email, and probable source of the spamtrap, is the Patriot Action Network, a prominent Tea Party organization that has appeared in my spamtrap collection a number of times before.

Read more…

May
17

Chase Bank: Sending Transactional Email to a Spamtrap

Chase Bank simply doesn’t get it, or doesn’t care. Months after I reported that Chase was spamming email addresses that did not belong to live customers with marketing and transactional email messages, it is now sending transactional emails containing a customer name and information about account activity to yet another spamtrap. This email was sent directly from Chase’s own IPs.

Read more…

Go back to top