Uncovering a Spammer

I’ve received a lot of emails about Emailresults.net, the com­pany that sent me the spam for Howard Dean’s cam­paign. The inter­est­ing thing is that they all seem to point to the fact that the com­pany is using har­vested emails and offer­ing them to cus­tomers as an opt-in list. A lot of their cus­tomers have been unaware of this prac­tice, appar­ently, and many peo­ple have writ­ten to legit­i­mate busi­ness (and in some cases, uni­ver­si­ties) that used the com­pany to dis­trib­ute their mes­sage. Com­plete blocks of email results addresses have been listed on the Spamhaus Block List, a list of known offend­ers in the spam wars.

The com­pany is part of a group called Media Heights, a com­pany that also includes two other divi­sions: Impulse Inter­ac­tive and MarketResearch.net. It has been very suc­cess­ful in the email mar­ket­ing busi­ness, lin­ing up blue-chip cus­tomers like Amtrak, British Air­ways, HP, McAfee, New Line Cin­ema, Sprint, Verisign, and Warner Broth­ers. Obvi­ously, none of these com­pany seem to know (or care) that their mes­sage is being sent to peo­ple who did not request it.

The com­pany does use a num­ber of data­base part­ners to accu­mu­late its col­lec­tion of email addresses. Here’s where each of those part­ners stands when it comes to sell­ing email:

Bigmailbox.com: We may share, rent, or sell personally-identifying infor­ma­tion you pro­vide us to THIRD PARTIES.

Dial­pad: The infor­ma­tion that you pro­vide is never sold to third parties.

IPO.com: This site is now closed and there­fore, those emails are no longer part of any con­trac­tual agree­ment a user may have had with them.

Got2goshop.com: We may share, rent, or sell that vol­un­teered personally-identifying infor­ma­tion you pro­vide us to THIRD PARTIES. (inci­den­tally, that com­pany is also related to Big­Mail­box men­tioned above)

Eye­ballChat: Eye­ball Net­works also uses per­sonal infor­ma­tion to inform you of pro­mo­tions, spe­cials and sur­veys if you have opted to receive these. Users who set up an account with or log onto the Eye­ball Chat Ser­vice with the applic­a­ble box checked con­sent to the use of their email address and other per­sonal infor­ma­tion to send elec­tronic adver­tise­ments and pro­mo­tions. Eye­ball Net­works may also use per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion to main­tain stan­dards for the Eye­ball Chat System.

Except for infor­ma­tion used to send elec­tronic adver­tise­ments and pro­mo­tions, as described above, Eye­ball Net­works does not sell, rent or lease any of the infor­ma­tion col­lected to third parties.

ZDnet (now part of CNET net­works): We have engaged com­pa­nies to work with us or on our behalf to pro­vide a prod­uct or ser­vice that you have requested, such as opt-in e-mail announcements

MovieLand.com: We may trans­fer or oth­er­wise dis­close infor­ma­tion col­lected from vis­i­tors to our Web site to our employ­ees and inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors, to our par­ent com­pany, sub­sidiaries and affil­i­ates, and to our con­sul­tants, other busi­ness asso­ciates, and sup­pli­ers, if the dis­clo­sure will enable that party to per­form a busi­ness, pro­fes­sional, or tech­ni­cal sup­port func­tion for us, or if required to do so by law. We may also dis­close infor­ma­tion we col­lect from our site vis­i­tors to our mar­ket­ing and busi­ness part­ners, who may use the infor­ma­tion in con­nec­tion with their busi­ness oper­a­tions, such as to send mar­ket­ing and other com­mu­ni­ca­tions to vis­i­tors of our site. We may also share, rent, sell, or trans­fer any per­sonal infor­ma­tion (includ­ing finan­cial infor­ma­tion) pro­vided by our vis­i­tors to third parties.

NetBroadcaster.com: Dur­ing the reg­is­tra­tion process, and at cer­tain times dur­ing any mem­ber user ses­sion, we may present you with addi­tional offers from third party ser­vice providers. Some offers are optional and typ­i­cally pre­sented as “yes/accept or no/decline” ques­tions. A checked response or yes/no but­ton selec­tion indi­cates your pref­er­ence. Cer­tain offers may be pre­sented with a pre-checked preference/selection. If you do not des­e­lect (opt-out) the checked boxes on our join form then we may trans­fer your pro­file infor­ma­tion to that third party ser­vice provider. Our third party ser­vice providers have their own terms and con­di­tions and pri­vacy poli­cies. We sug­gest that you visit their sites and review their terms and con­di­tions and pri­vacy poli­cies before you “opt-in” to any offer. We may share, rent, or sell personally-identifying infor­ma­tion you pro­vide us to THIRD PARTIES.

SweepsClub.com: Sweepsclub.com will not dis­close any of your per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion except when we have your per­mis­sion, under spe­cial cir­cum­stances — such as when we believe in good faith that the law requires it — or under the cir­cum­stances described below.

Online Mar­ket­ing Part­ners: Many pro­grams or pro­mo­tions offer oppor­tu­ni­ties to request addi­tional infor­ma­tion from our mar­ket­ing part­ners. By request­ing more infor­ma­tion, you give Sweepsclub.com per­mis­sion to trans­fer your per­sonal infor­ma­tion to our part­ner so it can ful­fill your request. Mar­ket­ing part­ners listed on Sweepsclub.com have sep­a­rate pri­vacy and data col­lec­tion prac­tices. Sweepsclub.com has no respon­si­bil­ity or lia­bil­ity for these inde­pen­dent policies.

In addi­tion, Sweepsclub.com may uti­lize the ser­vices of one or more third par­ties to facil­i­tate the trans­mis­sion of emails, adver­tise­ments and/or other infor­ma­tion. In con­nec­tion with such ser­vices, these third par­ties and/or their agents may have access to your per­sonal information.

Del­phi Forums: Del­phi Forums uses 24/7 Media and other third-party adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies to serve the ads that you see on our site. These com­pa­nies may use infor­ma­tion (not includ­ing your name, address email address or tele­phone num­ber) about your vis­its to this and other web sites in order to pro­vide adver­tise­ments about goods and ser­vices of inter­est to you.

Now if you look at it closely, a num­ber of the part­ners are either dead or have stated pol­icy express­ing that they never sell or trans­fer email addresses. How could they be con­sid­ered opt-in part­ners in those cases? The com­pany also says that

Cur­rently, over two dozen Data­base Part­ners work directly with Email Results

but only dis­closes ten of them, includ­ing one that no longer exists.

The next ques­tion in this is who are the other 14+ com­pa­nies that Emailresults.net uses. If this were a case of a sin­gle inci­dent (but peo­ple who have emailed me have shown that it’s not and sub­se­quent research in Google Groups shows that there is a pat­tern of abuse here), it would be an inno­cent inci­dent. Unfor­tu­nately, it is not and I’m afraid that other com­pa­nies could get hood­winked into using the dubi­ous prac­tices of a com­pany that can only be seen as a spammer.

For those of you inter­ested in avoid­ing fur­ther spam, there are two sites you might want to look out when giv­ing out email addresses: The first one is called Maili­na­tor and a more advanced one is called Spam Gourmet. Both these sites allow you to cre­ate addresses that can’t be used for spam pur­pose. Enjoy!

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