Fraudulent signups or spam?

Mailbox preview and HTML content

• steve
• Jan 23, 2015

• Technical

I just received a slightly confusing email.
 

 
The From address and the Subject line are from Sony, but the content looks like it’s from email analytics firm Litmus. What’s going on here?
Opening the mail it looks like a fairly generic “Oops, we lost a class-action lawsuit, have $2 worth of worthless internet points!” email from Sony; no mention of Litmus at all. My first thought is that Mail.app has managed to scramble it’s summary database and it’s pulling summaries from the wrong email, as I am on a Litmus mailing list or two, but nothing else looks off.
Digging around inside the source of the mail I do find a bunch of tracking gifs from emltrk.com, which is a Litmus domain so there is a Litmus connection there somewhere. Curious.
Finally, about two pages in to the HTML part of the mail I find this:

Target acquires email addresses, exposing more customers to data breaches

• laura
• Jan 16, 2014

• Best Practices

As most folks now know hackers broke into Target systems last December and stole financial and other data from 110 million customers. Target has been responding to this breach reasonably well. They’ve been notifying customers that were affected and they’re providing credit monitoring for affected individuals. They seem to be totally on top of protecting their customer’s data and privacy.
Mostly.
They seem to be purchasing or otherwise acquiring email addresses from at least one major retailer in order to send out notifications about the breach to customers that never gave them email addresses. Yes, even those of us who chose not to give Target email addresses are receiving email from them.
I understand Target’s drive to contact affected users. I even appreciate that. What I don’t appreciate is that Target appears to be compromising my security in order to notify me my security was compromised. The data of mine that was compromised at Target would be credit card and possibly address information. My email address was not part of the compromise. So what does Target do? They go and acquire my email address from a third party.
Their solution to the compromise is collecting more data that is vulnerable to compromise from unrelated third parties? I’m not sure this is the most consumer friendly thing Target could do. In my case, Target sent mail to an address I’ve only given to Amazon. That means I now need to worry about my Amazon account security, on top of everything else.
Ironically, the email sent by Target tells me that I can click a link and get free credit monitoring. Then the email goes on to tell me the following:

• Never share information with anyone over the phone, email or text, even if they claim to be someone you know or do business with. Instead, ask for a call-back number.
• Delete texts immediately from numbers or names you don’t recognize.
• Be wary of emails that ask for money or send you to suspicious websites. Don’t click links within emails you don’t recognize.

Don’t click links within emails I don’t recognize? You mean like the one you just sent me? With a link to a credit monitoring website?
I appreciate the notice. I don’t appreciate is that Target went out of their way to collect more information about me than I actually gave them. I am now worried about Amazon’s security as well. How did Target get an address only provided to Amazon? I don’t appreciate that my efforts to keep my information secure (not providing email address to Target) was undermined by Target themselves.
The full text of the email, with the relevant headers (munged slightly for privacy) is under the cut, if anyone is interested.

Outreach or spam?

• laura
• Dec 6, 2016

• Best Practices

This showed up in my mailbox earlier today:

The tweet in question

From Crunchbase: “Pluck is an email prospecting tool that gives you the email addresses of the people tweeting about subjects related to your business.”
Prospecting: another name for spamming. Look, I know that you want to sell you’re newest, greatest product to the world. But just because I tweet something with a # that you think is relevant to your product doesn’t mean that I want to get your spam. I also know it’s hard to get attention and find prospects; I’m a small business owner, too and I need to market my own services. But spamming isn’t a good idea. Ever.
There’s been a significant increase in this kind of spam “to help your business” lately. It’s a rare day I don’t get something from some company I’ve never heard of trying to sell me their newest product. It might be something if they tried a contact or two and then went away. But they’ll send mail for weeks or months without getting an answer. Look, silence IS an answer and it means you need to go away and leave your prospects alone.
Unfortunately, there are services out there that sell a product that let you “automatically follow up” with your prospects. Pluck up there uses one of them, as that’s who’s handling all the links in the message. In fact, if you go to the bare domain (qcml.io) they talk a good anti-spam game. “Die, spammers, die.” I reported the message to them. I’m not expecting them to actually do anything, and I’m not expecting a response.
It’s just spam under another name. There’s no pretense that it’s anything else. Even if it’s sent in a way that makes it look like a real person typed the message, like QuickMail offers. “All emails will come straight out of your personal inbox as though you typed them yourself.” As if you typed them yourself.
The worst part is there’s no real way to stop the mail. I can’t unsubscribe. The companies selling the software don’t provide any guidance to their customers about what the law requires. Take the message from Pluck that started the post. It violates CAN SPAM in multiple ways. Moreover, the address they used is not publicly associated with my twitter handle, which means they’re doing some harvesting somewhere. That means treble penalties under CAN SPAM.
I could reply and ask them to stop mailing me. I’ve done that a couple times with a message that says, “Please don’t email me any more.” I’ve got to tell you, some people get really mad when you ask them not to email you. Some just say yes, but others are really offended that you asked them to stop and get abusive. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t ask any more because of that one person who decides to harass, threaten and scream at me. Sure, it’s maybe 1 in 5, but I don’t have the time or energy to figure out who is going to be receptive and who isn’t. I don’t have time for that. No one has time for that.
I’m expecting that filters are going to catch up eventually and these types of mail will be easier to filter out. Until then, though, small business owners like myself are stuck in a place where we have to deal with spam distracting us from our business. At least I get blog content out of it.