Email received on 13 October, 2021 from Richard Hale, Tongue Tied (Manchester) Ltd. Richard or his company is not known to me, I have never had any dealings with them, have never communicated with them or connected with them on Social Media either.

The email says:

Hi Michael

Please forgive the email intrusion, but I know that people aren't always looking at their LinkedIn accounts so I thought I would try and reach you by email...

My name is Richard Hale and I am Managing Director at Tongue Tied (Manchester) Ltd, an ISO certified language agency, we have more than 30 years of experience in providing tailor-made language solutions for thousands of clients, including BMW, BUPA, Coca Cola, The F.A. & GlaxoSmithKline.

Our network of more than 4000 professional, native translators provide high-quality translations, into and out of most languages and specialities, that read like originals, not translations.

It would be great to be connected on LinkedIn as I provide a lot of free advice and information. I also share some hilarious translation fails which I am sure you will find amusing!

Please drop me a line and we can arrange a call and discuss how we can improve your translation processes and ongoing costs.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best Wishes,

Richard

Richard Hale
Tongue Tied (Manchester) Ltd
Phone: +44 1606 352 527

This email was sent by Tongue Tied (Manchester) Ltd. If you feel that you have received this email in error then we are sorry, no harm was meant, Please reply to this email with the word STOP if you no longer want to hear from us.

Registered in England 3915984

Tongue Tied (Manchester) Limited - 33 Hartford Road, Davenham, Cheshire CW9 8JA UK

The incidents of receiving unsolicited emails are increasing exponentially. I don’t know about you, but I definitely didn't have this many spam emails during the Covid-19 Lockdowns and I can confirm that it started to increase ever since we got back to a "new normal". I suspect that my email address has been collected from a business database and boom, many companies who are desperate for work are starting their spamming practice towards me! and some of you too?

In my world it is totally unacceptable that Richard emails me without having had any dealings with me previously, it is a clear example of what I call spray and pray. Spray your begging letter far and wide and Pray that someone will pick up on it. We’ve all been guilty of doing it, I can confirm I am definitely guilty of it, but I stopped it and will never send a marketing email to people I have had no dealings with ever again. The question has to be, why would you?

Let's get into the code and examine the raw source detail for spam reporting to the appropriate identifiable bodies:

Return-Path: richard@ttmlimited.com
Delivered-To: michael@.......com
X-FDA: 78691246746.01.680922C
Received: from or192-a.jsmtp.net (or192-a.jsmtp.net [207.200.3.192])
by imf26.hostedemail.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id BF3FC20019C3
for <michael@......com>; Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:50:33 +0000 (UTC) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed/relaxed;
d=ttmlimited.com; s=jm; h=Message-ID:Reply-To:Subject:From:Date:To:Content-Transfer-Encoding: MIME-Version:List-Unsubscribe:X-UserID:X-VConfig:Content-Type:MsgID; bh=oGReahvncHE/JWW5wsFeZWuBBWA=; b=DCf4mRQCxedAOA4h7aYjOP/2y7X7CXhTFcrHuzfKUArGcaHHElG/61F2OMBIq2LhN0F7+I FZicJR6PMlK0Ft+o350Unqbi/E5hivSWc9lbTf/QydfQD53zgUc05f09HiFmDKCfFqQ8vC 6IWWOuhTzckMH2JEc15KvuE6F/jOKF9G6UmMHadwgR8wPzxukZCxEv7WEZCFSaCQQ4wHiQ iafL5Rh6QZXq/2+VkYoRSoZ3W5KcGm7IONt60OGsOREGvqLELaOIp63XVLkZr/ETmgRp97 MehICyeq4F8HyJuj4UOMAub3w12iPn1ilrbLLQKaW2rnrd5gFt5jL7Bl57QNKg==
Message-ID: <212010813511544883@jngomktg.net> Reply-To: "Richard Hale" <richard@ttmlimited.com> Subject: In case you need us...
From: "Richard Hale" <richard@ttmlimited.com> Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:50:27 +0000
To: michael@.....com Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable MIME-Version: 1.0
List-Unsubscribe:
<https://track.ttmlimited.com/u.z? cb84c49bddf44722a0d6026559b8c610>,<mailto:ttm488@jangomail.com?Subject=Unsubscribe> X-UserID: 2120108.13511544883T976261
X-VConfig: T.13511544883
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
MsgID: AWS25_10-13-2021+11.50.22_4A5034B2A3994BF
Received: from localhost (127.0.0.1) by express-relay.jangosmtp.net with
ESMTPA id 4A5034B2-A399-4BF8-8272-6977B3937D18.1 envelope-from <richard@ttmlimited.com> (authenticated bits=0); Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:50:22 +0000
X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.09
X-Rspamd-Server: rspam03
X-Rspamd-Queue-Id: BF3FC20019C3
X-Stat-Signature: dzin8t166cpc4w8eubici9ofan98m1tk Authentication-Results: imf26.hostedemail.com;
dkim=pass header.d=ttmlimited.com header.s=jm header.b=DCf4mRQC;
dmarc=pass (policy=none) header.from=ttmlimited.com;
spf=pass (imf26.hostedemail.com: domain of richard@ttmlimited.com designates
207.200.3.192 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=richard@ttmlimited.com X-HE-Tag: 1634125833-608891

When I examine the raw source above, it allows me to try and identify any mail server clients, which many legitimate companies try to use. In this email I can see it says 'mailto:ttm488@jangomail.com'. I have never heard or come across JangoMail before.

I appreciate if you haven’t already been used to encoding the raw source, it will cause a bit of cross eyed looking before you are able to spot the relevant and actionable information. Not every spam email has the actionable data, most in fact do not and that’s why I use SpamCop more and more these days.

Armed with the JangoMail information it allowed me to check them out further, go to their website and see how I could report the abuse.

I found their anti-spam policy and was quite encouraged by their philosophy and what they class as spam. This is a great list and a fantastic reminder to every marketer who is planning an email campaign.

Examples of Spam

Any email message that is sent to a recipient who had previously signed up to receive newsletters, product information or any other type of bulk email but later opted-out by indicating to the sender that they did not want to receive additional email, then that email is spam.
Any email message that is sent to recipients that have had no prior association with the organization or did not agree to be emailed by the organization is spam.
Any email message that is sent to a recipient without a way for a person to opt-out or request that future mailings not be sent to them, is spam.
Any email message that does not have a valid email address in the From Line is spam.
Any email message that contains any false or misleading information in the header, subject line or message itself is spam.
Any email that says you can earn $1000s each week from home is spam.
Any email message that promotes an adult website is spam, unless the recipient has specifically requested information from that website.
Any message that contains “ADV:”, “ADV ADLT:”, or “ADV ADULT” in the subject is spam.
Any message that is sent to email addresses that have been harvested off of websites, newsgroups, or other areas of the Internet is spam.
Any message that is sent to email addresses that have been gathered via “email appending,” also known as, e-appending, is spam. E-appending is the practice of merging a database of customer information that lacks email addresses for the customers with a third party’s database of email addresses in an attempt to match the email addresses with the information in the initial database.

Required Elements on Every Mass Email

Every mass email sent through JangoMail must contain a single click unsubscribe mechanism, such as the default JangoMail unsubscribe link and the sender’s postal address. [TTM Ltd had included their postal address but had not included an unsubscribe link].

To pose questions about this Anti-Spam Policy, or to report spamming activity by one of our customers, please contact our mass mailer abuse department at:

P.O. Box 751024
Dayton, OH 45475
Tel: 937-701-7140
abuse AT us.jangomail.com

So I emailed them, because you never know how these mail server clients react and as I was encouraged by the language in their anti-spam policy, I of course emailed them.

To my complete surprise and delight I received a response during the same day as reporting with the result I was hoping for. Hopefully Richard Hale will think twice about doing a campaign like this again and spamming unsuspecting businesses. Of course he can just move to another email client server but once warned, hopefully he will stop this practice. I must just add that some of these companies engage marketing/branding agencies to do their dirty work for them without really appreciating what they paid for.

I also reported it to SpamCop and they send a report to what I believe must be a hosting service, lightedge.com.

I then researched via https://dnslytics.com/domain/ttmlimited.com the actual domain of Richard's and found that the domain is hosted by Ionos, the domain hosting company with the very weird adverts at the moment featuring this very weird lady. Of course I sent my standard email to her too!

Domain Name: ttmlimited.com
Registry Domain ID: 2544781947_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.ionos.com
Registrar URL: http://ionos.com
Updated Date: 2020-07-09T08:29:50.000Z
Creation Date: 2020-07-09T08:29:48.000Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2022-07-09T08:29:48.000Z
Registrar: 1&1 IONOS SE
Registrar IANA ID: 83

I don't believe any of the hosting companies will actually take any action at all towards domains that are spamming our inboxes, they are too interested in the monthly or annual subscription fees. Even the might Amazon Web Services (AWS), who I have reported dozens of domains to take no further action after their investigations. They don't regard sending emails from those domains as abuse.

The internet is flawed on so many levels and its astounding to witness how big tech has been totally hoodwinked by the spammers.

Just wondering whether Richard's company name is a Freudian Slip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_slip

Happy spam reporting!

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