It’s more than annoying
At the company I work for the policy for the email addresses of ex-staff
members is to accept the mail, then bounce it – one copy to the sender,
and one copy to the local postmaster. To me. The spam gets forwarded
to me. Y’know, just in case it’s not.
When you’re checking through a mailbox of this mail it becomes easy to
differentiate separate the pure spam (loans, toner, porn) from the rest.
Today I noticed a couple of mails, not tagged by an RBL, promoting MORE TH>N, a UK insurance company.
The mail was sent by US based email marketeers Yesmail.com (or “ConsumerBase” which gives out an invalid URL as a contact). The
addresses the mail was sent to have both been inactive and bouncing mail
for over a year. Did they give their addresses to yesmail back in 2001,
and it’s only in 2003 that they received mail. Somehow I doubt it.
More likely yesmail bought another “opt-in” list, itself probably dubiously derived.
One of the beliefs of the often so-called “permission marketing” industry is that the permission somebody gives can be bought and sold in perpetuity. Imagine it was the case that permission could become a tradable property, what marvellous reductio ad absurdum arguments could be conjured from that.
One the other hand if you have given permission to receive messages from yesmail, you’ll need to make sure you haven’t blacklisted 64.37.207.0/24. Hope that helps.
update: since writing I recieved the spam to another ex-address over 2 years out-of-use.
