AvantGardenDecor.com: Advertising Gift Ideas to a Spamtrap
AvantGardenDecor.com, an outdoor furniture and supplies merchant, is sending bulk email to an email address that was closed in 2008. This email address has not previously received email from this sender, either directly or via an ESP, since it completed its timeout period and was reactivated in mid-2011. The ESP is Listrak.
Sending IP: 66.109.242.17
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from vmta-17.lstrk.net (vmta-17.lstrk.net [66.109.242.17])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
Received: by vmta-17.lstrk.net id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Mon, 28 Nov 2011 06:xx:xx -0500
(envelope-from <xxx>)
X-Mailer-Reference: <xxx>
X-Message-Reference: <xxx>
X-RPCampaign: esp-<xxx>
Errors-To: <xxx>
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: AvantGardenDecor.com <Avantgardendecor@woodstream.com>
To: <xxx>
Reply-To: Avantgardendecor@woodstream.com
Date: 28 Nov 2011 06:xx:xx -0500
Subject: Explore Unique Gift Ideas: Save $10 off $40 Cyber Monday Only
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary=--boundary_<xxx>
Readable Email:
From: AvantGardenDecor.com <Avantgardendecor@woodstream.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Explore Unique Gift Ideas: Save $10 off $40 Cyber Monday Only
Reply-To: Avantgardendecor@woodstream.com
It’s The Prefect Time To Find A Unique Gift For The Outdoor Decorator On Your List
<removed>
You received this e-mail from Avant Garden Decor® because you signed up to receive promotional e-mails from us. If you do not wish to receive future advertisements from us via e-mail, click here to unsubscribe.
Avant Garden Decor® is committed to protecting your privacy and will not share your information.
View privacy policy.
©2011 Woodstream Corporation.
I truly appreciate this site. I believe in everything you do here. Please know that Listrak takes this incident VERY seriously. We are currently investigating the issue.
JOE DEVINE
SUCCESS MANAGER
Listrak
Cool. That’s what we hope to see. Let me know what you find out, please.
I manage the e-marketing team responsible for sending this email on behalf of our client, AvantGardenDecor. We use Listrak as the ESP platform, but work independently on it. Listrak has been very integral in our email marketing offering and they contacted me immediately upon seeing this post. The data we used was from the client’s house database and was the first campaign we deployed for them.
We are now working with them to removed lapsed, non-purchaser email addresses from the database in an attempt to remove the spamtrap. We are committed to being a responsible sender and I am looking forward to learning more from this site. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Good to hear from you!
All that I’ve seen so far is this single email to this single spamtrap that I reported. Information like that is mostly useful as a wake-up call: your customer might have a purchased list included on their list, but it is at least as likely that they just have a very old and poorly maintained list. This spamtrap was not a pure spamtrap, which should never receive email, or a role address, which rarely sends email and almost never subscribes to bulk email lists. It is probably an email address that was once “live” and had a real user, but was closed at some point before the domain registration lapsed.
Such email addresses, properly managed (and this one was), should not appear on properly managed bulk email lists, but we both know that many lists are not properly managed. <wry grin> Check to make sure that your client is currently processing bounces properly, and (if they are) ask when that started. Also, check to see if your client accepts web form subscriptions and adds them to the list without first confirming them via an email to the email address which the user must respond to to finish the subscription. Typos (in web forms or from manual data entry) can put even pure spamtraps on lists. If the list appears dirty, you need to clean it, remove unresponsive email addresses, and perhaps repermission it.
If I see any large amount of spamtrap hits, I’ll post an alarm. Otherwise, I’ll just look forward to this sender disappearing from my mainsleaze spam folder. 🙂
Unfortunately this emailer is still hitting my spamtrap. It doesn’t appear that the removal of old email addresses has happened yet.