Nov
14

General Mills Bell Institute: Emailing a Long-Closed Email Address

Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition, a research wing of multinational food giant General Mills, is sending bulk email to an email address that was closed in 2007. Bell Institute has not emailed this email address since it was re-enabled after its timeout period in 2010. Either Bell Institute is emailing a list that has been allowed to lie fallow for years, has failed to process bounces, or is using a purchased list. The ESP is SilverPop.

This issue was marked “resolved”, but the spam started up again at the end of November 2011.

Sending IP: 208.85.54.45

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from mail1308.generalmillsinc.mkt685.com (mail1308.generalmillsinc.mkt685.com [208.85.54.45])
        by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
        for <xxx>; Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
Received: by mail1308.generalmillsinc.mkt685.com (PowerMTA(TM) v3.5r16) id <xxx> 
        for <xxx>; Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:xx:xx -0500 
        (envelope-from <<xxx>@bounce.mkt685.com>)
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:xx:xx -0500 (EST)
From: General Mills Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition <no-reply@bellinstitute.com>
Reply-To: no-reply@bellinstitute.com
To: <xxx>
Message-ID: <xxx>
Subject: November is National Caregiver Month
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
        boundary="----=_<xxx>"
x-mid: <xxx>
x-job: <xxx>
x-orgId: <xxx>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:<xxx>@bounce.mkt685.com?subject=Unsubscribe>

Readable Email:

From: General Mills Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition <no-reply@bellinstitute.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: November is National Caregiver Month
Reply-To: no-reply@bellinstitute.com

Health and Nutrition News – National Caregiver Month

Dear Health Professional,

Among the many months that create awareness around food and nutrition, November – National Caregiver Month – may not be top of mind for most. But it is of particular significance. After all, November solidifies the beginning of the holiday season and most can agree that holidays are best spent with good food surrounded by family.

<removed>

Copyright © 2011 Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition.

To unsubscribe from Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition electronic communications, please send an e-mail to bell.institute@genmills.com with unsubscribe in the subject line. Please note that if you unsubscribe, you will be removed from all electronic communications from the Bell Institute, including new product announcements, coupons, the newsletter and the latest science updates.

©2011 General Mills General Mills Home Privacy Terms of Use

6 Responses to General Mills Bell Institute: Emailing a Long-Closed Email Address

  1. ltimmons
    November 15, 2011 at 5:43 pm

    I work at General Mills and we are looking into how this could have happened, we never intentionally send any email to anyone who doesn’t want it. If you were willing to disclose the SPAMTRAP address that would help me identify how it got included in the mailing.

    • SpamBouncer
      November 15, 2011 at 7:01 pm

      Good to see you here. 🙂

      I can’t disclose spamtrap addresses, of course. That’s pretty much a given for an antispammer who has a spamtrap collection; it isn’t personal. If the identities of spamtraps are known, they’re not useful any more. There are too many disgruntled ex-employees, dishonest business competitors, and dishonest nutcase antispammers out there who are perfectly willing to feed known spamtraps into web forms without permission. <wry grin> I have a known “spamtrap” (spamtrap@spambouncer.org) and blogged about these very things a few weeks ago when it started getting spam from a legitimate company. If you search for the spamtrap name, you can find that blog.

      However, I provided information about the spamtrap to help you figure out what might have happened. To recap: this is an email address that probably belonged to a real person at one point, but was closed in 2007 or earlier. I later acquired the closed domain, and for a few months longer than a calendar year left all email addresses disabled, which means that they rejected email delivery attempts with a 500-level rejection. This is how antispammers are supposed to manage spamtrap domains and email addresses that might have been legitimate at one time; it allows companies with legitimate mailing lists to see the bounces and remove those email addresses from their lists. The email address was re-enabled in late 2009 and redirected to my spamtrap collection. I also checked my records; no email was sent from any email address at bellinstitute.com or generalmills.com to this spamtrap since it was re-enabled. So if you ever sent email to it previously, you must have done so before I acquired the domain and placed it on “timeout” in mid-2008, and probably before 2007.

      You can use this information to rule out certain things. Unless your list existed prior to 2007 and was allowed to lie fallow (unmailed) at least from mid-2008 to the present, somebody added this email address to your list without permission, probably recently. If it were left-over from 2007 and you’d somehow failed to process bounces, I should have seen other spam from Bell Institute or General Mills before this when I searched my archives. One or two emails might have gone astray, but not a regular series. So the possibilities appear to me to be:

      • * Fallow list. Somebody resurrected a *very* old list that hadn’t been contacted for years. If that’s the case, I’d recommend removing the list from your current recipients and discarding it; half of it will be old/closed email addresses and a number of those will probably be spamtraps, here and elsewhere.
      • * Unconfirmed web form subscription. If you allow people to subscribe to this list by typing their email address in a web form on your web site, you need to start confirming those subscriptions before you add them to your list. Typos and deliberate non-valid addresses are inevitable with web form subscriptions. You have to protect yourself from that, and the only way to do that is to confirm each email address with an email to it that requires a response to complete the subscription to the list.
      • * Purchased list. I’m sure these are against your policy, but marketing departments often fail to get that memo. <wry grin> Check with anybody who has access to the specific list that has the spamtrap. Somebody might have wanted to increase circulation and bought a supposedly-targeted opt-in list. Of course, there’s no such thing as an opt-in list for sale; the people didn’t opt-in to your emails or to just any email from just any company that could purchase a list. You need to be sure that people who have access to mailing lists in your company know this and understand that under no circumstances are they to purchase a list.

      If either points #2 or #3 are the case, then you also need to perform a good list scrubbing and, if that doesn’t stop the spamtrap hits, reconfirm the list. Your ESP can explain how to do either of these things, or both.

  2. ltimmons
    November 22, 2011 at 4:08 pm

    Thanks for your help, we found the error and that account should not receive any further emails.

  3. SpamBouncer
    November 22, 2011 at 5:06 pm

    Excellent. No spamtrap here has received any more email from this address or any other at Bell Institute. I will therefore mark this listing resolved.

  4. SpamBouncer
    November 30, 2011 at 6:40 am

    Unfortunately I spoke too soon. The same spamtrap received more spam from Bell Institute today. Whatever error you found did not fix the problem. 🙁

  5. Pingback: General Mills Bell Institute: Continuing to Spam a Long-Closed Email Address » MainSleaze

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