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Comment on Maddox on Link-Baiting Aggregation Sites

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Not to defend ranker.com, but maybe maddox@xmission.com really isn't in their database.

It's possible that someone is automatically forwarding a different address to maddox's inbox.

It'd be worth examining the SMTP header of one of these messages and tracing back the ownership of each relay.

That's not actually his problem. They could easily add an unsubscribe link and make everyone's lives easier, but that would screw up the faux familiarity.

In fact, if this is a US company, I'm reasonably confident those messages are not CAN-SPAM compliant.

The text of the personal reply makes this possibility unlikely:

  I'd really hate to lose the "Best Page In The Universe",
  maybe we can find something a bit more suited to your liking.
Obviously it's not just a random email address that someone forwarded on to Maddox if the site name is specifically mentioned.

Biot, meet formmail. Formmail, mmet biot. So it goes.

It may well be that, but that doesn't make it okay. They shouldn't be building an email database by scraping, which is almost certainly what happened.

In a vaguely related note: I recently had a situation with an organisation that kept bulk emailing a plug for its conference and would ignore requests to eliminate all addresses using[mydomain].com from their database (they were sending email to aliases as well as actual mailboxes).

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