I looked through 10 pages of abuse reports on Google and it appears that they send newsletters (non-spam) and promotions (subversive opt-in spam) from the same reverse DNS entry. In that same class C there are other spammy domains associated with them, but apparently not used for the primary service.
Since their opt-out system seems to work, I'm actually going to give their reverse DNS even more negative weight to allow the newsletters through along with the small bit of spam sent from the same reverse DNS, and I'm going to tell clients that complain to unsubscribe themselves. The only thing that worries me here is how many different companies iVillage is giving these addresses away to, and who in turn those third-parties are sharing with. So even if iVillage isn't directly responsible for the totality of spam, they would be the point of entry.
It seems that the person that subscribed to this list also gets about 500 pieces of spam a day, and something tells me that she surfs the Internet with their E-mail address copied to her clipboard so that she can quickly subscribe to every harvesting site out there that she can find. I've been thinking of offering this person a job of populating spamtraps considering how good of a job she does at attracting spam (to two different accounts I might add). To make matters worse, this is the ex-wife of a good friend of mine that actually administrates E-mail accounts (our service) at her job...
Something else that I've noticed; women on my service seem to get double the volume of spam that men do. I think that might have something to do with women trusting things more, or at least being less skeptical. My sample is still fairly small though.
Matt
Colbeck, Andrew wrote:
They're at least a self-inflicted nuisance, but I don't know if they're spammers. I lump e-mail advertising their websites in the same category and weighting as geocities.com and angelfire.com ... but I can do that because we're not an ISP.
Andrew.
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 4:19 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Declude.JunkMail] iVillage...spam house???
I just came across the following block:
129.250.156.0/24
This belongs to iVillage, and it includes Astrology.com as well as spam sources webstakes.com and twnailsvc.com. Webstakes.com has a different postal address from iVillage, but twnailsvc.com is registered to the same exact address. Clearly iVillage is spamming, and using different identities to hide from responsibility.
Now the conundrum. Obviously they are a mixture of legit and illegit, and a very popular site. I've been counterbalancing Astrology.com in order to allow them through our system, however, I'm starting to wonder if this is wise after discovering this. I read their privacy policy, and there's nothing private about it...they share all the information that you provide with third parties.
I'm not sure how to handle this. Consider it Malware and delete on site? Does anyone know if they deliver first-party/identified messages from a separate address block than the one above?
Matt
BTW, Josh, regardless of that RFC, you can't currently register a domain name with an underscore, at least not a dot-com or dot-net. The fact that Microsoft wrote that RFC makes it circumspect :)
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