Kodak Sends Spam Email

Reported Kodak Company Spam Email

Kodak Reported to Have Joined the Mainsleazers
    Reported in nanae, anti-spam newsgroup. April 20, 2004.
    A poster to news.admin.net-abuse.email reports in detail being spammed by Kodak and their response to his complaint.
    It appears Kodak has gone over to the dark side of mainsleaze spam.
         Search groups.google.com news.admin.net-abuse.* archives on "kodak".

Earthlink Facilitates Kodak Spam Email
[The following quotes a usenet newsgroup article found in news.admin.net-abuse.email]
From InactiveX666@hotmail.com Tue Apr 20 07:42:32 2004
Path: monger.newsread.com!news-toy.newsread.com!netaxs.com!newsread.com!newsprint.newsread.com!prodigy.com!prodigy.com!news.glorb.com!border1.nntp.ash.giganews.com!border2.nntp.ash.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!elnk-atl-nf1!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net.POSTED!56520ccc!not-for-mail
Subject: Earthlink + Kodak: Spamming Partners
From: Jonas Smithson
Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email
Message-ID: <200420040213181458%smithsonNOSPAM@REMOVETHISboardermail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit
Mail-Copies-To: nobody
User-Agent: Thoth/1.6.0 (Carbon/OS X)
Lines: 44
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 06:13:19 GMT
NNTP-Posting-Host: 66.167.184.245
X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net
X-Trace: newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net 1082441599 66.167.184.245 (Mon, 19 Apr 2004 23:13:19 PDT)
NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 23:13:19 PDT
Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net
Xref: news-toy.newsread.com news.admin.net-abuse.email:2395431

I recently got a fancy HTML-formatted spam, advertising Kodak photo
services, from Earthlink (my ISP). I was surprised at this, because
I'm used to getting tons of spam from obvious criminals, morons, and
criminal morons, but not usually from real companies (although J.C.
Penny did spam me many times a couple of years ago).

In the past, Earthlink had emailed me advertisements for their own
services, despite my having chosen all the opt-out options on my
account Web page. But I don't recall their ever spamming me with
unrelated services before.

I called Earthlink to complain, but got a complicated runaround, made
worse by my difficulty in understanding the heavy Indian accents of
their overseas help desk people. I then forwarded the spam to
abuse@earthlink.net, and (after more runarounds, including their demand
that I send them "more email headers" despite the spam having obviously
come from them), they eventually admitted that they had, in fact, sent
me the spam. Earthlink also admitted that I had already opted out of
such things. They said they couldn't explain why I got the spam anyway,
but said they'd "look into it."

Then I called Kodak to complain. I expected them to say that Earthlink
had assured them their ad would only go to "opt-in" customers -- but
no, two different people at Kodak had the gall to deny Kodak had
anything to do with the spam at all! I asked one of them whether she
thought Earthlink had sent me a Kodak ad out of charitable feelings for
Kodak, and was met with a stony silence. The conversation went downhill
from there and ended... um... rather abruptly, but we can skip over
that.

What really upsets me is the "prior business relationship" issue. For
example, today Verizon gave me a recorded telemarketing call, despite
my being on the National Do Not Call list, but I'm sure (if I had
bothered to complain) they'd just say that as a Verizon customer I have
a "prior business relationship" with them. Fine; and I have one with
Earthlink too -- but I have *no* such "relationship" with Kodak. Yet it
seems Earthlink thinks they can *transfer* this so-called
"relationship" to any company that pays them! This makes a mockery of
the entire distinction between "unsolicited" and "prior business
relationship".

Perhaps Kodak is getting desperate because they're going down the tubes
due to their technologically obsolete business model. As far as I'm
concerned, the sooner they collapse the better, and good riddance.