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Getting paid for receiving junk email

I might be tempted to follow Adrian Kennard's lead..

One of my email accounts is being bombed with junk email from several marketing companies.

Today's highlights include Amazon Prime, Range Rovers, Renault cars and tax difficulties. Typically the same account is getting more than one of each (of the same email) a day. This started about a week ago.

This is spam e-mail, and I seem to recall AK sending invoices to the senders in anticipation of taking them to court should they refuse to pay - and getting paid.

So at £10 per invoice I reckon I could potentially make £3000 per month here.

These appear to originate from four senders, at least two of which lead back to a company called Merrehill.

Question: who am I invoicing - Land Rover (for example), or Merrehill?

Edit to add: in the couple of minutes it took to type that I now have yet another one, this time offering a free issue of The Economist, sent by "YouSaveOnline". Which leads back to "3110media" (dot co dot uk).

"You've received this newsletter from YouSaveOnline as you registered and gave permission through our website, associate sites or communications."

Nope, I did not. This is spam email.
 
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In fairness Adrian did have a lot of hassle with some spammers and not everybody agreed to pay up, so it might first be worth experimenting with one company (the easiest to identify and most accountable - making sure they're based in the same country as you) to see how far you get. Personally though I'd just add them to the blacklist and forget about it.
 
As much as I like shopping at Lidl, I am now getting EIGHTEEN identical emails at a time from them.

I suspect a bug in their system doesnt check that it already has your address when collating emails from competitions etc.
 
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In fairness Adrian did have a lot of hassle with some spammers and not everybody agreed to pay up, so it might first be worth experimenting with one company (the easiest to identify and most accountable - making sure they're based in the same country as you) to see how far you get. Personally though I'd just add them to the blacklist and forget about it.

That's what I'd normally do. It's the sheer volume of these that's offending me. And that the mailbox in question is so rarely used or quoted that I just can't see how they every got hold of the address.

And that I suspect there's one or perhaps two companies at the root of this flood-bombing:

Just had another two back to back. One is from yousave23 and the other from yousave24. Different contact details, different addresses, different unsubscribe links.

I shall take a short video of my using the unsubscribe feature and then have a go with the letter and invoice approach if, as I suspect, it continues - I've tried to "unsubscribe" before.
 
Moved onto the yousave25 domain now, squirting out the identical spam emails. Presume that's to get around the block lists they end up on, this is essentially a "flood bomb" approach.

Back with the other junk sender, this is a classic. Unsubscribed myself yesterday and took a video of doing just that. This just came in:

The reason for my email today is to ask whether you would be interested in running an email campaign to help drive additional traffic to your website and generate new leads.
Using our UK Business email database, you can get your message out to a specified target.

Have sent a copy of this to their upstream hosting provider as this is a clear breach of their network's AUP.
 
Unless you are certain it is a legitimate company, you should NEVER use the "unsubscribe" link, you are just confirming your address is real, so they can then sell it on to lots of other spammers.

I use several gmail accounts and one time emails from MaskMe, so very few people get my real email address; Gmail seems to be VERY good at filtering spam these days, less than 5% seems to get through, and I havent had a false positive in ages.
 
These emails annoyed me enough to take a video of my unsubscribing to use later on.

I contacted one of the senders and let them know that I'd reported them for their breach of their provider's AUP and to tell them to desist.

I got a reply back quite quickly. I have had other emails subsequently, so I've set up a rule in Outlook to move them to "Junk E-Mail" and send a copy to the named individual at the sender company concerned so they loop back to her.

Shall tackle the other one tomorrow.
 
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For the second one, the unsubscribe didn't work. Emails kept coming.

So as I've moved them all to Junk Email it was a simple affair to search for all the junk from one company, create a rule to forward anything incoming containing certain words in the sender's address, to every email address I could locate at that marketing company, and then run that rule in the current folder.

This resulted in a big stack of emails being sent out straight away - all the crap from the last week or so, with the same mailings multiple times. No reply but the junk email has now stopped. Hurrah.
 
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