An interesting article at NetworkWorld last month, describing spam bombs to victims of fraud and identity theft to hide the transactions and notifications from financial institutions. The targets are individuals, whose identity and personal information the thieves already have. The victims’ email inboxes suddenly get flooded with thousands upon thousands of emails — as many as 60,000...
I haven’t been able to track down any information about what happened, but it seems MINI USA had a major oops in their email marketing recently. So much so that they’re sending out apologies by snail mail. Pictures of the apology package appeared on Reddit earlier this week, and include a chocolate rose, some duct tape and a SPAM can stress reliever. It’s a great example of a...
Dear Spammer, If you are going to send me an email that claims it complies with the Federal CAN SPAM act of 2003, it would be helpful if the mail actually complies with CAN SPAM. In this case, however, you are sending to an address you’ve harvested off my website. The mail you are sending does not contain a physical postal email address. You’re also forging headers. Both of those...
For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam. Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website...
I’m finding out that email address harvesting off websites is alive and well on the Internet. We have a rotating address on the contact page, which does get harvested but usually the spam is attempting to sell me blog related services. I didn’t expect to get a very different collection of emails to the address I posted here. I’m quite surprised that address is getting a...
Unsubscribing should be so simple. Even if someone signed up for mail, senders should let them go when they unsubscribe. Unfortunately, there are a lot of senders that make it difficult to unsubscribe. In fact, many companies are still hiding unsubscribe links behind login pages. Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that any recipient pay any fee, provide any...
I tend to go back and forth about reporting spam these days. On one level I know that it’s all a numbers game, and policy enforcement is more about the quantity of complaints than the quality. Knowing this I don’t often send in complaints. I do make a few exceptions: when I know the policy enforcement team or when it’s a current or former client. The responses I’ve gotten...
What is a spamtrap? According to a post I saw on Twitter: By definition, a spam trap is an email address maintained by an ISP or third party, which neither clicks nor opens emails, meaning it does not actively engage with the emails it receives. That’s not the definition of a spamtrap at all. A spam trap is an email address that does not belong to an actual person but still receives...
I linked to Al’s post about misdirected emails and how annoying it is for people who receive emails. I’ve previously talked about the problems associated with not handling misdirected emails properly. It’s really annoying getting email that you never signed up for. For instance, one of my email addresses gets quite a bit of misdirected email. Oddly enough, much of this mail...
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