This blog has reached a milestone - 1000 pageviews! I realise that isn't a lot compared to almost any other blog, but I've been going for less than a month.
Today I did a bit more work with spammers, making more progress with Honda UK, and introducing the news about the PEC Regulations 2003 to Groupon, Train4trade, Clearsmoke, Marketing1 and Psychometric Advantage. And I might be imagining it, but I do think that the amount of spam I receive has reduced.
It was a bit tricky finding out the phone number for Psychometric Advantage, the spam leads you to a form that sends in a "contact me" request, and I didn't want to fill that in, for obvious reasons. But a whois on their domain name got me the name Matt Paines (also known as Maitland Paines), a bit of googling turned him up as director of several companies, they all have web sites, and I got a phone number for him from one of them.
On the down side, Halifax seem to be refusing to take any action over their affiliate's spamming activities (I got an email which demonstrated that they'd completely misunderstood the issue, and thought I was reporting phishing), but I've tried another avenue with them. A big disadvantage with big companies like that, is that no-one ever knows who is responsible for what, and you get passed around a lot. But that's also an advantage, because that gives me lots of opportunities to make it someone's responsibility. For example - the spamming offence against the PEC Regulation (2003) might be a Marketing issue, it might be a Legal issue, it might be a PR issue, it might be a Customer Service issue, it might be ... you see what I mean? And obviously I don't know who in the company is supposed to take responibility, so I can try them all.
I'm getting more spams from Accident Advice Helpline. But I've sent them on to Tony Rose (tonyrose99@hotmail.com), so he can look into them.
I've also been getting spams looking for a UK distributor of a product called "Cup lamp", but a few seconds work showed me that this was coming from Hong Kong, so I'll just block their spams.
I found out why some of the spam that I've been forwarding on to various people hasn't been arriving. It's being intercepted by Messagelabs who think it's spam - well, I can't blame them for thinking that. They provide an antispam service to the companies. But it looks like in every case so far, putting the email into a Word file gets past that spam filter.
Jackie Falls at The affiliatepeople got another phone call from me, because I've had another spam from one of their affiliates. She sounded a bit down, so I tried to cheer her up by telling her I'd call her again if there were any more.
Clearsmoke has now sent me three spams to three different addresses (yes, I have a *lot* of email addresses). I phoned them up on 0800 335 7004 for each one, speaking to Al for the first two, and John for the third.
Freedom Marketing has contacted Azam Marketing and told them to remove my email address; if some of the information I've been given is correct, that should wipe out quite a large number of spams.
I also used the ebuyer unsubscribe link to get myself off their list - I had indeed bought something from them several years ago, and that, of course, would give them permission to badger me for ever - but not now, since I've requested that they stop.
And text marketer has told me that they bought their list from UK Data Company, 0207 748 6112, while emailmovers (who send out the spam for UKFast) got their list from Premierlists, 0870 765 1250, but that number doesn't seem to work. Both Text Marketer and UK Fast have taken action.
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