May
22
Compensation Management Resources
Do you know who Compensation Management Resources is? I do not. Nonetheless, they’re sending mail to an address at a domain that has had no valid users since at least early 2007 (but probably much longer). The sender’s methodology seems legitimate — they’re using a legitimate list management software package called Lyris. But the address they’re sending to sure feels like evidence of spam to me.
The ESP or list owner seems to be Business 21 Publishing, based in Pennsylvania in the USA. Their Lyris server appears to be hosted by an ISP called NetAtlantic.
Source IP: 69.25.194.117
Return-Path: <bounce-x-x@na2list.b21pubs.com>
Received: from na2list.b21pubs.com (na2list.b21pubs.com. [69.25.194.117]) by
x with SMTP id x; Wed, 09
May 2012 x:x:x -x
From: "Compensation Management Resources" <training@b21pubs.com>
To: x
Subject: Do your incentive plans drive the right behavior? Are you sure?
Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 x:x:x -x
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="x"
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:x@na2list.b21pubs.com>
Reply-To: conferences@b21pubs.com
Message-ID: <LYRIS-x-x-x--x#x@na2list.b21pubs.com>
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--x
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
How to be sure your incentive plans=20
are driving the right behavior
Anyone who=92s ever crafted incentive plans knows how difficult they are to=
get=20
right =97 and how catastrophic the consequences can be when you get them wr=
ong.
B21pubs.com isn’t on my list of known ESPs, so low volumes of spam would almost certainly have flown beneath the radar. No more. 🙂 I am searching the spam archive for the past few weeks to see if they are hitting spamtraps.
These guys have been spamming for a long time. Looking through my old mail logs, they’ve tried to email a variety of different spamtraps and invalid addresses going back as far as 2006. They’ve also tried a variety of b21 domains — b21pubs.com, b21mail.com, bus21pubs.com, and b21updates.com.
It looks like they tried to guess/epend addresses based off of employee information. Like most B2B spammers, they haven’t wound up on nearly as many RBLs as you’d expect given the length of their spamming career. It looks like they’ve been using the NetAtlantic addresses (na2list.b21pubs.com) since late 2008, and they’re only showing up on a few RBLs. Heck, 69.25.194.104 in that range seems to even be whitelisted by Hostkarma.
Also, I did a bit of searching and turned up some Yelp reviews about their spamming. A review from 2010 claims that their unsubscribe link doesn’t work and that calling them to complain led to the reviewer’s phone number being sold (presumably to marketers). While I obviously can’t confirm any of that, I did also come across some complaints of deceptive cold calls from the company.
As for NetAtlantic, they seem to be an ESP, but their on-going association with Business 21 Publishing is enough to make me seriously question where they stand on the spam issue. It doesn’t help that SpamCop found NetAtlantic questionable enough that they don’t bother forwarding spam reports to them (or at least that was their stance in May 2011).
Spamcop will not send reports to any ESPs from what I can see, so that does not indicate anything to me. But the rest of that information is quite interesting, thank you!