Famous Footwear: Selling Shoes to a Spamtrap?
Apparel company Famous Footwear is sending bulk email to an email address that, to my knowledge, never existed. The ESP is Yesmail, which is hitting an astonishing number of my spamtraps lately.
Sending IP: 209.11.164.86
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from brownshoe-145.brownshoe.postdirect.com (brownshoe-145.brownshoe.postdirect.com [206.165.247.145])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Sun, 30 Oct 2011 06:xx:xx -0500 (CDT)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2011 04:xx:xx PDT
From: "Famous Footwear" <FamousFootwearShoes@email-famousfootwearshoes.com>
Subject: LAST DAY TO SAVE 30% during Friends & Family
To: <xxx>
Message-ID: <FamousFootwear.<xxx>@email-famousfootwearshoes.com>
X-Vitals: <xxx>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:brownshoe<xxx>@email-famousfootwearshoes.com?subject=unsubscribe>
X-Header-Versions: FamousFootwear.<xxx>@email-famousfootwearshoes.com
Reply-To: FamousFootwear.<xxx>@email-famousfootwearshoes.com
X-Header-CompanyDBUserName: brownshoeff
X-Header-MasterId: <xxx>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="==========<xxx>====="
Readable Email:
From: Famous Footwear <FamousFootwearShoes@email-famousfootwearshoes.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: LAST DAY TO SAVE 30% during Friends & Family
Reply-To: FamousFootwear.<xxx>@email-famousfootwearshoes.com
View this message as a webpage: http://link.famousfootwear.com/<xxx>
Be sure to add famousfootwearshoes@email-famousfootwearshoes.com to your address book and never miss a message!
FAMOUS FOOTWEAR
LAST DAY!
FRIENDS & FAMILY: SAVE 30%
Take an extra 30% off your entire purchase! Every shoe, no exclusions!
Offer valid 10/26/11-10/30/11.
In-store code: <xxx>
Online code: <xxx>
Get a coupon for a future purchase when you share this offer
http://link.famousfootwear.com/<xxx>
<removed>
You are receiving this message because you opted-in your email address (<xxx>) to receive emails from Famous Footwear.
If, for any reason, this promotion is not capable of running as planned, sponsor reserves the right to cancel, terminate, modify or suspend the promotion. This includes, but is not limited to, infection by computer virus, bugs, tampering, unauthorized intervention, fraud, technical failures or any other causes beyond the control of the sponsor.
If you would like to be removed from our mailing list, please follow this link: http://email-famousfootwearshoes.com/unsubscribe.jsp?<xxx>
View our privacy policy: http://link.famousfootwear.com/<xxx>
To ensure ongoing optimal receipt of these communications, please add famousfootwearshoes@email-famousfootwearshoes.com to your address book.
FamousFootwear.com | 8300 Maryland Ave. | St. Louis, MO 63105 USA.
(c)2011 Brown Group Retail, Inc., a subsidiary of Brown Shoe Company (NYSE:BWS)
Is Yesmail (InfoGroup) in scope for this blog? They sell lists and do e-pending. Here are links on the Infogroup web site:
http://infogroup.com/list-services/list-management/b2b.aspx
http://infogroup.com/list-services/append-services/email-append.aspx
I don’t set the rules for the Mainsleaze blog, but I think that list sales and e-append should disqualify a bulk email company from being considered a legitimate ESP.
An update…. Famous Footwear is still sending spam to the same spamtrap perhaps two to three times a week. People at InfoGroup read this blog, and one responded to a different spam report, but only to ask to talk in private. I’m hesitant to do that with any ESP unless I know them to be responsible and anti-spam. That is NOT Yesmail’s reputation, to put it mildly.
Famous Footwear won’t loose a customer in me; I have unusually wide and weirdly shaped feet, so I get shoes from a local specialist who is good at fitting my feet. A single hit on a single spamtrap (even a pure spamtrap — an email address that never existed) is also not proof of deliberate spam. Most retailers do not confirm subscriptions to their mailing lists, even those that come via the web site or are written down at a trade show and typed in manually later, which means that a typoed email address is always a possibility. So other than repermissioning email addresses that do not respond to their emails or click links in them, there may not be much that they can do.
If Famous Footwear is hitting other spamtraps, however, that changes the picture. If anybody reading this blog is getting unsolicited bulk emails from them, I’d like to hear about it either in the comments or privately.