I hear a lot of people claim that spam isn’t really a problem any more. That filters are so good that the average user doesn’t see a lot of spam and if they do get “legitimate” mail that they can just opt out. These are great sounding arguments, the problem is that those arguments aren’t always true. There is an address I stopped using for commercial mail around 1997...
Last year a class action law suit was filed against Papa John’s for violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) for texts received by Papa John’s customers. Customers allege they never opted in to receive promotional text from the company. Papa John’s claim that they didn’t send the marketing, but instead was sent by third party contractors. A blog post on...
A number of people have contacted me over the last week pointing out that Paul Wagner was handed a negative jury verdict in his lawsuit against Gevalia and Connexus. (background Wash Post Article Washington Post verdict article, Ken Magill Article). I spent some time this afternoon downloading different documents from Pacer trying to understand what was going on in the case and what the...
There is a contingent of senders and companies that seems to believe that receiver ISPs and filtering companies aren’t measuring reputation correctly. Over and over again the discussion comes up where senders think they can improve on how reputation is measured. One factor that is continually repeated is the size of the company. I’ve even seen a couple people suggest that corporate...
How can companies avoid paying spammers and having their brand associated with spammers? One of the easiest ways to avoid spam is to not pay for acquisition email. Simply don’t set up an affiliate email marketing program. There are a lot of folks who don’t like me saying that, and who have argued vociferously with me over the years. But email is not a good medium for acquiring new...
Over the last week Steve and I have posted about the AARP hiring affiliates to send spam on their behalf: starting with the poorly done email message, moving through the process of identifying the responsible entity and then walking through the details of how we tracked the spammer. Why spend a week writing about the AARP spamming? I initially posted about the AARP spam because it was such a...
or Why All Of This Is Meaningless: Guest post by Huey Callison The analysis of the AARP spam was nice, but looking at the Mainsleaze Spammer Playbook, I can make a few educated guesses at what happens next: absolutely nothing of consequence. AARP, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say “It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous lead-gen...
On Tuesday Laura wrote about receiving spam sent on behalf of the AARP. The point she was discussing was mostly just how incompetent the spammer was, and how badly they’d mangled the spam such that it was hardly legible. One of AARPs interactive advertising managers posted in response denying that it was anything to do with the AARP. This isn’t from AARP…this is a SPAM that’s been going...
Yesterday I wrote about spam I received advertising AARP and used it as an example of a mainstream group supporting spammers by hiring them (or hiring them through proxies) to send mail on their behalf. My statement appears to have upset someone, though. There is one comment on the post, coming from an IP address allocated to the AARP. This isn’t from AARP…this is a SPAM that’s been going around...
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