Forum Moderators: buckworks
Some spammer got hold of his my email newsletters. Either they received an actual newsletter or they downloaded it off the website where he posts them. At the bottom of his newsletter is info on unsubscribing and reporting spam. They forwarded this email to about 50,000 people. He can see this in his statistics that it's been forwarded that much. They insert their spam message above where the newsletter starts, but leave the newsletter intact.
So, people are reporting his company as spammers because they just go to the bottom of the email and see his companies info for reporting spam and unsubscribing.
His email marketing engine, has shut down his account and are saying they will take further action against his company as spammers. Now they're asking for the below information....ip addresses, referral URLs....he does not know what they're talking about because he has no record of who complained or received the spam. So he can't fulfill their requests. His web designer says they can blacklist his domain & ip address and that it would take years to pull out of that.
Is that true? Since he is using a 3rd party, how would they blacklist his ip address? Does anyone have experience with this? How can he fix it?
His email marketing engine said that in order to help him, they want information about his clients such as the date and time of the opt-in, subscription consent, IP addresses of the web server the complainant used to connect to his website, the sign up referral or Referral URL.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
[edited by: lorax at 2:18 pm (utc) on April 1, 2009]
My understanding is that it is the IP address bit that you should look into - I may be a little off on this but my understanding is that when you receive an email the recipient logs the ip address of the sending mailserver, and unlike the from: field this can't be spoofed, therefore all these spam copies of your newsletter can be proved not to be sent from your mailserver. Certainly that is how the SpamCop blacklist works - they provide a list of sending ip addresses that they have been observed sending spam in the recent past, and mailserver admins can use this to reject mail.
