TagSpam

September 14, 2011

Spammer prosecuted in New Zealand

By laura

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14September

Today (well, actually tomorrow, but only because New Zealand is on the other side of the date line) the NZ Department of Internal Affairs added a 3rd statement of claim against Brendan Battles and IMG Marketing. This third claim brings the total possible fines to $2.1 million. Brendan is a long term spammer, who used to be in the US and moved to New Zealand in 2006. His presence in Auckland was...

September 12, 2011

ESPs, complaints and spam

By laura

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12September

Steve wrote a while back about how Mailchimp handled his complaint. Sadly, I have a counter example from recently. Hey, guys, You’ve got a customer hitting an address they bought from someone selling really old lists. This entire domain was retired more than 5 years ago, and laura-info@ was never used to sign up for anything. I sent it to abuse@ the ESP because I thought it might do some...

August 22, 2011

Uptick in botnet spam

By laura

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22August

There’s been a heavy uptick in botnet spam over the last few days, judging by things I’m hearing and my own mailboxes. There are a few common subject lines, but all of them are trying to get recipients to either run programs or visit malicious web pages. The first subject line I’m seeing a lot of is “<name> wants to be friends with you on facebook!” In my...

August 19, 2011

Defeating spamfilters through obsession

By laura

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19August

[The harasser] was hitting me on email and twitter for more than [2100 messages], and the thing was, those all got past the filters I’ve got in place. So one obsessed crazy man with minimal technical skill and nothing but persistence outperforms all the spambots out there, at least on the scale of individuals, if not in breadth of attack. PZ Meyers Dr. Meyers goes on to suggest that spammers...

August 3, 2011

The little things

By laura

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03August

It really amuses me when I get blatant spam coming from a network belonging to one of our Abacus customers. I know that the complaint will be handled appropriately.
It’s even better when the spam advertises the filter busting abilities of the spammer. I get a warm, fuzzy feeling to know that the spammer is going to be looking for a new host in the immediate future.

July 26, 2011

No one harvests email addresses any more

By laura

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26July

There are a lot of people who assert that “no one” actually scrapes websites for email addresses any longer. My experience indicates this isn’t exactly true. We have a rotating set of email addresses on our contact page. Every day we push out a new email address. Every day we expire addresses that were pushed out 7 days ago. I can say, with 100% certainty, that there are people...

July 19, 2011

Are you sure? Part 2

By laura

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19July

There was a bit of discussion about yesterday’s blog post over on my G+ circles. One person was telling me that “did you forget you opted-in?” was a perfectly valid question. He also commented he’s had the same address for 20 years and that he does, sometimes forget he opted in to mail years ago. As an anti-spammer with the idea that it’s all about consent, I can see...

July 18, 2011

Are you sure you didn't opt in?

By laura

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18July

Yes, really. I’m sure I didn’t opt-in. I get a lot of spam. I get a lot of spam to addresses that aren’t used to sign up for mail. But it seems inevitable that when I bring up examples of receiving spam I inevitably get asked, “Are you sure you didn’t opt-in?” On one level I can understand the question when I send in a complaint to an abuse desk and...

July 14, 2011

TWSD: I can haz ethix marketing

By laura

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14July

I’m getting slammed by spam advertising URLs at from
Ethix Marketing LLC
711 S. Carson Street Suite 4
Carson City, Nevada 89701
The kicker? They’re violating CAN SPAM while they’re doing it. Seriously, sending mail out through open relays and proxies with forged From: addresses is a violation of CAN SPAM. And they’re spamming for ambulance chasers.
Spammers, eh?

May 31, 2011

Marketing or spamming?

By laura

3 Min read

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31May

A friend of mine sent me a copy of an email she received, asking if I’d ever heard of this particular sender. It seems a B2B lead generation company was sending her an email telling her AOL was blocking their mail and they had stopped delivery. All she needed to do was click a link to reactivate her subscription. The mail copy and the website spends an awful lot of time talking about how...