Did anyone actually look at this email before sending?

I received spam advertising AARP recently. Yes, AARP. Oh, of course they didn’t send me spam, they hired someone who probably hired someone who contracted with an affiliate marketer to send mail.
The affiliates, while capable of bypassing spam filters, are incapable of actually sending readable mail.

Screenshot of totally incompetent spam
No one looked at the mail before they sent it
That’s actually how the message appeared in my mail client: totally unreadable images. When I looked at the raw source of the message I found pages of hashbusting text in HTML comments.
I’m not surprised. A lot of legitimate and responsible and well-known groups hire spammers. They’ll argue they prohibit spam in contracts with affiliates, but the verbiage in the contract only means anything if they choose to enforce the no-spamming clause. Many of them don’t.
This is why a lot of spam filtering companies and ISP postmasters don’t care that they’re blocking legitimate companies. Why? Because legitimate companies hire spammers to send their mail. This same email address gets spam from any number of nationally branded companies.
Hiring affiliates, or hiring marketing agencies who hire email marketing companies who hire spammers, gives a sender legal cover for spam. It may even give the company plausible deniability. But that doesn’t change the fact that those senders are supporting and encouraging spam.

Related Posts

Important notification spammers break the law

I’m currently being inundated at multiple address with spam advertising spamming services. Most of these notices have the subject line: IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION. The text includes:

Read More

Spammers aren't who you think they are

Shady direct marketers exploit CAN SPAM to continue spamming but protect themselves from the law. This is something I’ve been talking about for a while (TWSD), and it’s nice to see the mainstream press noticing the same thing.
HT: Box of Meat

Read More

TWSD: Using FOIA requests for email addresses

Mickey has a good summary of what’s going on in Maine where the courts forced the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to sell the email addresses of license purchasers to a commercial company.
There isn’t permission associated with this and the commercial company has no pretense that the recipients want to receive mail from them. This is a bad idea and a bad way to get email addresses and is no better than spammers scraping addresses from every website mentioning “fishing” or “hunting.”

Read More