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.

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You want to sell me a list?

Over the years, some of my clients have found it expedient to give me email addresses at their domains. These addresses forward mail addressed to laura@clientsite to my own mailbox. Generally these are so I can be added to internal mailing lists and have access to their internal tools.
It’s often amusing to see the spam that comes through to those addresses. Over the last few weeks I’ve received multiple spams advertising an email appending service.
Let the irony sink in. An email appending service is sending me an email at a client company offering the client company the opportunity to append email addresses. “See how accurate our appending is!”
How accurate can a service be if they can’t even target their own spam correctly?
In addition to the appalling targeting they’re also violating CAN SPAM (no physical postal address), their website is a collection of broken links and they don’t provide any company name or information in the email or on the website.
To top it all off, the mail says, “if you’re not the right person to act on this mail, please forward this to the right person.” Followed by a standard legal disclaimer that says, “The information contained in this e-mail message and any attachments is confidential information intended only for the use of individuals or entities named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail at the originating address.”
I wonder if blogging about the utter email incompetence about mail from David Williams, Business Development (phone number: 800-961-5127) violates the confidentiality clause?

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Tagged.com's newest trick

I signed up a disposable address at tagged.com last summer, to see how their signup process went and how aggressive they were at marketing.
They mailed me maybe a dozen times over the course of a month and then the mail stopped.
Until today.
Today I got two messages from tagged.com, one from Sophia C (33) and one from Melinda E (27). The messages are identical except for the names and some of the advertising on the bottom.
I find it a bit coincidental that after all the recent news about Tagged that I start getting mail from them again. Mail that is not from anyone I know. Mail attempting to entice me into logging back into the tagged site.

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TWSD: keep spamming even when they say they'll stop

About a month ago I posted about receiving spam from a psychic attempting to sell me candles and stuff. The spammer was sending mail from a company called “Garden of Sound” using an ESP called OnLetterhead. A brief investigation led me to believe that unsubscribing from the mail was not going to do anything.
The post prompted an email from Scott B. the VP of Marketing of the company that is responsible for OnLetterhead. I replied to his email, pointing out a number of things he was doing that made his business look like an ESP front for spammers.
After he received my mail he called me to talk to me about the content of my post and the email and to assure me they were immediately implementing one of my suggestion (that they not put a generic “here’s how to unsubscribe” link on their 1000+ link domains, instead have those actually point to their AUP and corporate pages). He also assured me they took my complaint seriously and I would no longer be receiving email.
Guess what?
Garden of Sound is still spamming me from OnLetterhead. They’ve not even managed to implement the changes they pledged would be rolled out the same week as my blog post. Sure, the domain I’m getting spam from is different, the physical postal address is different, the product is different, the friendly from is different. But the preheader still says “this mail sent by Garden of Sound.” It’s all the same list, it’s all the same company, it’s all the same group of spammers.
Despite Scott’s attempt to convince me he wasn’t a spammer, it seems my initial impression was right. OnLetterhead is simply are a company attempting to look like they’re legitimate without actually taking any responsibility for the email going out from their network. They can’t even manage the bare minimum.
It’s companies like this that give the rest of ESPs a bad name.

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