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January 26, 2006

Dinosaur spam

It's standard spammer practice to desperately munge words like Viagra and Rolex to avoid spam filters. But it's especially sad when a self-proclaimed "CAN-SPAM compliant" spammer has to disguise his company name in spams.

I received one of these today in an unsolicited pitch for cellphone ringtones. The sender's company name was displayed in the email like so:

T-Re>< |\/|edia

The 1499 Blake Street 1-H, Denver address listed in the message corresponds to T-Rex Media, LLC, the Colorado company owned by Jeff Perreault, former sales manager for spam king Scott Richter.

Chapter 10 of Spam Kings gets into the messy 2003 mutiny by Perreault and other OptinRealBig.com employees. Richter alleged that Perreault et al. made off with his customer lists, proprietary software, and other goodies when Perreault split to set up his own company. Richter ended up suing Perreault and his gang in Denver District Court for breech of contract, business interference, and other charges.

Why would T-Rex Media, which boasts that it is "white listed with aol/hotmail," have to resort to camouflaging its name in junk emails? (The zip code was also munged, using the letter o instead of zeros -- 8O2O2.)

The T-Rex web site also makes this claim: "Our lists are 100 percent opt in and we are fully Can Spam compliant." Funny, I don't recall opting in to their lists. (Seems I'm not the only one who's been spammed by T-Rex in recent weeks.)

Maybe I'll send T-Rex a letter asking to opt out. But no way am I using the unsubscribe link in the T-Rex spam. It goes to stopmailinglist.com, a site run by the blacklisted spam operation Azoogle.

Posted by brian at January 26, 2006 10:46 AM