counterspammerism

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Spam Report 7: Case Study profiling Adweek

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If you’re a marketer you will likely have read or heard of Adweek, correct? Yeah, me too. At one point I even had a shortcut in my Apple News app, which I rarely use nowadays. All news are ads, period.

Back to Adweek, out of the blue I received an email from Cindee Weiss, Production Director at Adweek. Don’t know her, never communicated with her, never signed up to anything from Adweek, as far as I know they are completely unknown to me.

I did my normal checking, which mail server, IP, domain etc. so I could report the domain. But nobody wanted to know, so I emailed Cindee and was astounded at her blatant response to my questions.

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Spam Report 6: Case Study Profiling Mailrush.io

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I received the following email from Keith Rainville.

Learn to build an email list of your best customers on LinkedIn or access our database of over 500 million businesses worldwide.

Then simply send the list with just an EmaiClik! [note the on-purpose spelling mistake to get through any spam filters!]

Build and send unlimited Cold Emails from the best all-in-one solution on the market.

One Monthly Charge for Unlimited Everything! All-in-one Solution!

What you get:

Build unlimited lists
Send unlimited lists
Sales sequence newsletter campaigns with unlimited email send
Linked auto-connect feature
Find emails from first name last name and company name
Find emails from domains
Chatbot solution to capture and convert visitors to leads

and much more...

Start your 7-day trial and get grandfathered in for just $99 per month.
Use Promo Code: WELCOME301 and save $30 on your first month for a limited time!

Cheers Keith Rainville

Founder/Developer

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Spam Report 5: Case Study profiling Tongue Tied (Manchester) Ltd

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The incidents of receiving unsolicited emails are increasing exponentially. I don’t know about you, but I definitely didn't have this many spam emails during the Covid-19 Lockdowns and I can confirm that it started to increase ever since we got back to a "new normal". I suspect that my email address has been collected from a business database and boom, many companies who are desperate for work are starting their spamming practice towards me! and some of you too?

In my world it is totally unacceptable that Richard emails me without having had any dealings with me previously, it is a clear example of what I call spray and pray. Spray your begging letter far and wide and Pray that someone will pick up on it. We’ve all been guilty of doing it, I can confirm I am definitely guilty of it, but I stopped it and will never send a marketing email to people I have had no dealings with ever again. The question has to be, why would you?

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Spam Report 4: Reporting Tools

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Since my counter spammerism journey, which I started at the end of March, I have managed to find many look-up tools to uncover mail servers, name servers, domain registrars, IP addresses and much more. This has allowed me to email directly to the owners of the mail or domain servers and report the abuse.

This has had very mixed results, I have to say, some will engage and get back to you and others you just don't hear anything from. It hasn't deterred me though, I knew I would learn more about spam and how it is constructed, the types of offenders and how the internet is basically flawed. Anyone who is persuaded to invest into Bitcoin derivatives I wish them luck. I can't imagine anything worse then having my money tied up in the flawed internet. Blockchain or not, how can you possible believe that when the Internet is basically flawed you would secure your hard-earned cash inside of it.

Anyway back to reporting tools. Sending direct emails to abuse@ email addresses is not really delivering the kind of results I was hoping for and then on top of that, there's one specific type of email that is, for me at least, impossible to identify its origin, mail or domain. This type of email are usually the ones that suggest that there's a bucket load of money waiting to be claimed by you, you know the ones, I should be a triple billionaire by now and of course I am not!

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Spam Report 3: Case Study profiling ABL Business Ltd

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Email received on 17 September, 2021 from Andy Redman, ABL Business Ltd. The individual or company is not known to me, I have never had any dealings with them, have never communicated with them or connected with them on Social Media.

Firstly the email he used to send to me isn't even my own company email. I do some freelancing for a drumming music teacher and in order to formalise communication with outside organisations I was given a company email address by the teacher. I hardly use this email and it's not in the public domain on many websites, although recently I did add this email to a Birmingham website.

Upon further investigation, I realised this was indeed a legitimate organisation and Andy Redman is real, I discovered their website and saw his name on LinkedIn too. Then I looked into the links at the bottom of the email, in particular the privacy statement. I then realised the privacy statement layout and information was exactly the same as two previous unsolicited emails I had received the previous day by Ideal Lighting and Print by Splash.

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Spam Report 2: Case Study profiling BairesDev

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As part of my journey uncovering email spammers, I have started publishing some of my results on LinkedIn and tagging individuals in organisations, especially the senior leaders. This strategy is definitely starting to have some impact. In the past two incidents I have received responses from the organisations involved, either by the person who has been tagged or someone who works in the organisation.

Dialogue is good, it means they are taking the exposure seriously. I’m not sure everyone knows that LinkedIn has a super powerful search engine and therefore the possibility of negative press and exposure is a very real possibility. At least I am discovering a positive method for using LinkedIn, instead of just posting adverts about what I am doing and promoting my business, which is basically how most use LinkedIn, that and of course the personal Facebook-like posts that are appearing all over these days.

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Spam Report 1: A journey into the dark web!

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They have finally have gotten to me, after years of being a prolific emailer and trying to circumnavigate the daily spammers, I have decided to take action. You could call it ‘war on spammers’ or ‘counterspammerism’, I’m going after them in a small way but even in a few short weeks I have been able to grow my knowledge about the ways that I can start making some impact.

This is the first of what will be several reports on my progress in an effort to share some insights, which others may wish to investigate themselves.

Just to set the scene. My computer is an Apple Mac, but because it’s 8 years old I’m on Catalina. I use Apple Mail on my Mac and my iOS devices, but the bulk of the heavy lifting of course will have to be done on the Mac as on iOS as far as I can see you can’t even interrogate the email header. Seeing as the email header is where the majority of the research takes place then all the work will have to be done on the Mac.