Jan
20
Hotels.com Thinks That I Need a Vacation
They’re right. 🙂 But their uncanny ability to read my mind does not justify spamming a personal email address. The ESP was ExactTarget.
Source IP: 66.231.84.80
Headers:
Received: from mta2.email.hotels.com (mta2.email.hotels.com [66.231.84.80])
by <redacted> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <redacted>
for <redacted>; Fri, 20 Jan 2012 <redacted> -0600 (CST)
DKIM-Signature: <redacted>
DomainKey-Signature: <redacted>
Received: by mta2.email.hotels.com (PowerMTA(TM) v3.5r16) id <redacted>
for <redacted>; Fri, 20 Jan 2012 <redacted> -0600
(envelope-from <bounce-<redacted>@bounce.mail.hotels.com>)
From: "Hotels.com UK" <info@mail.hotels.com>
To: <redacted>
Subject: Europe sale save 40% + subscriber only discount coupon
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 <redacted> -0600
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:leave-<redacted>@leave.mail.hotels.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
x-job: <redacted>
Reply-To: "Hotels.com UK" <reply-<redacted>@reply.mail.hotels.com>
Message-ID: <<redacted>>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="<redacted>"
Spamming a blocklister isn’t exactly the smartest move on the block. 😉 Hotels.com has hit my spamtraps from time to time as well in the past three months. I would have to check to know how many spamtraps were involved; it might have been only one.
This is one of those ones where I probably can’t do much for you based on this report alone. Based on the data I have at hand, they don’t seem to be mailing anybody other than registered subscribers and the stats don’t seem out of whack. It’s not that I disbelieve you, it’s that in an instance like this the investigation path would be to investigate a specific recipient. With a munged, pseudonymous report, one can’t do that, so one has to look to other data points to see if something seems awry…and I’m not seeing anything that looks awry.
I’ll definitely keep an eye out for additional complaints or other information that might be able to drive further investigation.
By “investigate a specific recipient” I mean ask the sender to explain to me where and when and how that subscriber came to be in their database.
I’ll see if I can find a spamtrap hit for you, Al. It won’t be Hotels.com UK in my case, though. (At least, I don’t recall seeing anything from them.) So would it even be the same list? (I don’t even remember if it was the same ESP, come to think of it.)