www.nickhodge.com

Update, 3:20pm

Just off the phone to the Pub­li­cis. There are two issues here: one is the broken con­fig­ur­a­tion of @pm.ad as the reply-to email address. A mis­con­fig­ur­a­tion error.

Thanks to Pub­li­cis for reach­ing out and being hon­est; and start­ing to resolve the issue.

From earlier today:

1. Poten­tial source of the “fol­low”: I men­tion metamu­cil on twit­ter. No occur­rences of this word on my blog until this par­tic­u­lar post­ing. and oth­ers such have found the same issue with unso­li­cited email from the same sender, with sim­ilar contents.
2. Up until this point, I have been a happy and reg­u­lar user of said fibre sup­ple­ment brand below. Note that this brand is owned by Proc­tor and Gamble. I am not going to link out to said product.
3. The per­son that received this email is men­tioned 5 times on my web site, and there is at least one link from my site to theirs (note: I have “xx”’d the name out below)
4. The owner and pub­lisher of this web site, Nick Hodge, in no way, expli­citly nor impli­citly gave per­mis­sion for any brand: includ­ing Microsoft, to use to my blog as “trusted ref­er­ence sell” nor source of email addresses. Read­ing Microsoft’s policy on Online Pri­vacy, I am pretty sure that doing this style of “email har­vest and ref­er­ence social mar­ket­ing” is highly wrong, and con­tra­ven­tion of this policy is a ser­i­ous offence.
5. “Unsolicited email” is spam. Plain and simple.
6. The con­tent on my site is (cc) Attribution-Non-commerical Share-Australia 2.1, as per the link at the bot­tom of each page. I con­sider this spam­ming is a breach of my Terms and Conditions.
7. Sub­sequently, I am very unhappy with Pub­li­cis Mojo. You do not get social media, you are a spam­mer. Of the worst kind.
8. I am recom­mend­ing the receiver of this email report both Proc­tor and Gamble, and Pub­li­cis Mojo as a Spam­mer as per the Spam Act (2003) and amendments
9. It seems that the domain name “pm.ad” might exist, how­ever fur­ther research by an white-hat secur­ity expert:
   • *.ad is a top-level domain owned by Andorra, the country
   • pm.ad would be a logical place for ‘pub­li­cis­mojo an advert­ising agency’ to register; or may be used for internal sites
   • if you send email to ‘postie@publicismojo.com.au’ the bounce back is from the same mail.publicismojo.com.au IP address as in the below spam example: 134.159.132.130
   • 130.159.132.130 is Pub­li­cis Mojo in Aus­tralia (as per apnic)
   • rob­tex has some inter­est­ing details on this domain range

From: Blog Seeding <BloggerRelations@pm.ad>
Date: 2008/12/9
Subject: For xx
To: xx@xx.xx.au

Hi xx,

Sorry for the unsolicited email.

I was reading your blog and noticed you're particularly influential in the blogosphere.
I even saw your blog reposted on NickHodge.com.

I'm working on behalf of Metamucil on their new Fibresure product and
I was wondering if you would be receptive to us sending you a xmas gift pack?
No obligations, of course!  

Look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Publicis Mojo