Fellon-McCord: Inviting a Spamtrap to a Seminar
U.S.-based energy market advisor and manager Fellon-McCord is sending bulk email advertisements to a closed role address at an ISP that went out of business in 2002. This spamtrap has also not previously received email from Fellon-McCord. The role address is not one of the standard role addresses used at many sites, which might account for its presence on a large number of lists for sale. It is also unlikely to be result of a typo. The ESP is Sendgrid.
Sending IP: 74.63.194.28
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from o1.go.net-results.com (o1.go.net-results.com [74.63.194.28])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with SMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
Received: by 10.41.xx.xx with SMTP id <xxx>
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:xx:xx +0000 (UTC)
Received: from localhost (unknown [10.41.xx.xx])
by <xxx> (SG) with ESMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:xx:xx +0000 (UTC)
From: Fellon-McCord <no-reply@go.net-results.com>
Reply-To: Fellon-McCord <tjoelson@fellonmccord.com>
To: <xxx>
Subject: [Save the Date] Executive Energy Management Seminar
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:xx:xx +0000
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="<xxx>"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <xxx>
X-Sendgrid-EID: <xxx>
X-Sendgrid-ID: <xxx>
list-unsubscribe: <xxx>
Readable Email:
From: Fellon-McCord <no-reply@go.net-results.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: [Save the Date] Executive Energy Management Seminar
Reply-To: Fellon-McCord <tjoelson@fellonmccord.com>
March 19 & 20
Louisville, KY
Fellon-McCord will host our biannual Executive Energy Management Seminar on Monday and Tuesday, March 19 & 20, 2012 in Louisville, KY.
The purpose of the event is to share our Knowledge in Energy with clients and contacts and give an informative overview into both Electricity and Natural Gas Markets.
Topics covered will include: Electricity and Natural Gas Sourcing, Electricity and Natural Gas Price Drivers, Energy Contracting, Demand Side Management and Risk Management Strategies.
<removed>
Fellon-McCord is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA)as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. State boards of accountancy have final authority on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit. Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be addressed to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors, 150 Fourth Avenue North, Suite 700, Nashville, TN, 37219-2417.
Web site: www.nasbatools.com.
If you no longer wish to receive these emails, simply click on the following link: http://go.net-results.com/wf/unsubscribe?<xxx>
Fellon-McCord
10200 Forest Green Blvd.
Suite 601
Louisville, Kentucky 40223
US
Thank You for bringing this to our attention.
Fellon-McCord has been in business for over 20 years and has a long list of past and current clients.
We recently began using a marketing automation machine to make sure we manage our communications going out and that our messages are received by relevant contacts. Further, the system allows our contacts to unsubscribe if they no longer want to receive communication from us.
We believe the above e-mail ‘Spam-Trap’ to have been in our database as a former client.
We have done a thorough scrub of our database to remove all bounced e-mails.
If you have any questions or recommendations, please reach out to me directly.
Trevor Joelson
Fellon-McCord, Marketing
(502) 214-9335
That would be odd, because your email was sent to a role address, not to somebody’s personal address. If I don’t see any more spam, however, I will assume that what you did fixed the problem. 🙂
I believe what we did today fixed the problem!
It took some education from some great partners of ours, but we were able to identify the role addresses that made it into our databases and remove them.
I saw no more spam until today, when another spam was sent to the same “role address” spamtrap as before.
And again today. :/ Sendgrid, you need to review this customer’s practices a bit more thoroughly.
Thanks for the additional information, Catherine. We’re investigating.
We have worked with SendGrid and our Marketing Automation partner to first identify all of the role accounts and then to immediately unsubscribe.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to me directly at 502-417-9750.
We definitely appreciate the education we received and the fact that this was brought to our attention.
How? Not all role accounts are obvious role accounts. This one does not fit the normal pattern and searches or algorithms would miss it, although a human who reviewed your list would probably spot it.
The issue isn’t the single role account; it’s that an old email address that you weren’t mailing started getting mailed again. Why did that happen? Are you attempting to reactivate old email addresses? If you are, you should not be doing that.
Folks, another Fellon-McCord spam hit a spamtrap today. This is getting a bit ridiculous. I don’t know what you are doing to clean up your lists, but so far I’m not seeing the results.
With the last e-mail that went out, we identified and removed identified role accounts that made it into our database.
Upon the May 24th notice, we have worked with our marketing consultant to identify all the recipients of yesterday’s email . We’re going to check
the engagement level of each contact. If they have never engaged with any of
our campaigns by click or open, we are going to unsubscribe them.
We are also going to work with our IT team internally to identify aged
contacts who may have moved on from their company or no longer hold the role they once did
Catherine, are there any other actions you recommend we take?
Apologies for the delay. My email decided to act up yesterday and I spent much of the day getting it sorted out between actual work tasks. 🙂
I’m not sure what to tell you. If it were not that the nature of this spamtrap creates an unusually strong case for a purchased list or other non-opt-in acquisition process, I’d have dropped the issue a long time ago. Single spamtrap hits usually allow for explanations other than a purchased list or something similar.
That isn’t the case here. I have an unusually good knowledge of the previous use of the spamtrap. It wasn’t subscribed to bulk email lists when it was live. It hasn’t been live since 2002. (Your own domain fellonmccord.com was first registered in 2000.) And the spamtrap name, although it doesn’t match the usual search algorithms for role addresses, is unique enough and meaningful enough that a typo really isn’t credible.
*If*, as I suspect, somebody at Fellon McCord purchased a list, then what you really need to do is to identify the list and remove it. List cleaning and repermissioning the list aren’t appropriate where purchased lists are concerned.
Fortunately, you do have a good clue: this email address first received email from Fellon McCord on January 19 of this year. I unarchived and searched over a year of previous spam archives during which time this spamtrap was accepting email and in my collection. No email from Fellon McCord to this (or any other) spamtrap was there. So unless you reactivated an uncontacted list from before October 2010, this email address was a recent acquisition. You should investigate the possiblity of a list purchase in that time frame that somebody added to your active list without telling you about it.
You should also investigate the possibility that somebody hired an email append service for your old customer list. I tend to forget that many marketers see that and list purchases as separate issues. From an antispam point of view, they’re the same thing. If an individual did not give you a specific email address for the purpose of contacting them, then sending bulk email to that individual at that email address is spam even if that individual is a customer. Further, email append services have a horrendous fail rate — often in excess of 40%.