ESPs, complaints and spam

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 good and that the ESP in question wouldn’t support spammers.
The response I got was that I had been unsubscribed. Their abuse desk person also assured me, “We have a no tolerance for the sending of unsolicited mail, and we will not allow this sort of behavior to continue.”
Except, this is actually the second time I reported this spammer to this ESP. And the spammer is still spamming through that ESP.
I really don’t care if ESPs actually let people spam through them. If they want to do that, fine. But, don’t tell your abuse and compliance staff to tell people that there is a no tolerance policy for spam. Seriously, this mail is unsolicited. It was unsolicited in July when I reported the same customer to you. And it will be unsolicited in 3 months when your customer decides to add my address back to his list again.
 
 
 
 

Silly spam subject line of the day
Typoed email addresses

Related Posts

Defeating spamfilters through obsession

[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

Read More

Be on the lookout

I’m hearing more rumors of ESPs seeing customer accounts being compromised, similar to what happened with The Children’s Place.

Read More

ESPs leaking email addresses

Two of my tagged email addresses started getting identical pharma spam over the weekend. It is annoying me because I am now getting spam in a mailbox that was previously spam free. The spam is overwhelming the real traffic and I am having to make some decisions about what to do with the email addresses and their associated accounts with the companies I gave them to.
One thing I did notice, though, is that both companies use iContact as their ESP. A cursory check of my other mailboxes shows that none of my other tagged addresses are mailed through iContact. I don’t think it’s very likely that these two individual, unrelated companies made deals with the same spammers to sell address lists at the same time. It’s much more likely that there was a compromise somewhere and address lists were stolen.
Edit: Checked my other account and, likewise, I’m getting the same spam to a 3rd address serviced by iContact. I’ve sent mail to all 3 companies involved and we’ll see how they react.
And, as I was thinking about this, iContact just laid off a bunch of staff about the same time they announced their partnership with Goodmail. Based on past history with companies in this situation, it seems possible this is a disgruntled former employee. I’ve also seen reports from other people noticing spam to addresses given to iContact customers.

Read More