On May 22, 2003 John Brogan of Global IntelliSystems wrote this message concerning the presence of his domain name in the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domains.
Globalintellisystems.com is present because of this unsolicited bulk email advertisement. The target address of that advertisement was a "spam trap" that has never been a valid except as a target of spammers. It has been censored in that copy of the advertisement to protect it from "listwashing."
I answered Mr. Brogan saying in summary that his objection made no sense to me.
Mr. Brogan responded by saying something about a paid subscriber with an address at carefirst.com. Note that as far as I know, the advertising sent to the spam trap had nothing to do with carefirst.com.
At that time the issue seemed closed and did not warrant public comment, and so it was not added to this web page.
On January 6, 2004, Susan sent this strongly worded objection to the presence of mywiredplastic.com in the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domains. Somewhat censored, "Susan" wrote this:
WHAT THE F--K. I USE MYWIREDPLASTIC AS MY ONLY SOURCE OF INCOME REMOVE THIS SITE FROM YOUR FUCKING LIST YOU A-----E!
Mywiredplastic.com is in that list because of this unsolicited bulk mail message. That copy of that spam has been censored to obscure the "spam trap" address to which it was sent. That address has never been a valid address but is popular among the most disreputable unsolicited bulk email advertisers.
At that time, the domain name mywiredplastic.com was owned by a "One Global Finance" of West Bountiful, Utah. I have the impression that West Bountiful is a small town, but it seems to have a surprisingly large number of senders of bulk mail advertising financial opportunities.
On September 8, 2005 John Brogan wrote this message. His point seems to be to say that since I care about accuracy I should not list some or all of his domain names. He says globalintellisystems.com, jbrogan.com, and investorplace.com are unrelated to others that I assume are in a sub-list of the unwelcome domain names. He also says that jbrogan.com is his personal domain name and has never been used for spam.
I do not care about the details of the relationships among organizations in the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domains. Judging from what Mr. Brogan says and from a whois record, those three are related to each other. investorplace.com seemed related to the larger group by this spam. The domain name in the return address of that spam is financepages.com. The WHOIS record for that domain name says it is owned by Drew Lanzetta.
The Google NANAS record of reports of spam involving investorplace.com is substantial.
It also seems that Mr. Brogan misunderstands the nature and purpose of the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domain names. It is NOT a list of "spammers" or even of unsolicited bulk email senders, but instead is a list of sources of unwelcome email. Spam is the most common reason mail from listed sources is unwelcome, but it is certainly not the only reason. For example, some major banks are listed because there none of their customers have mailboxes at rhyolite.com but a lot of phishing spam forged to appear to be from them is sent toward rhyolite.com.
I have now added the correspondence with Mr. Brogan to this web page the interests of accuracy and disclosure,
Other questions are answered in the list of objections about entries in the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domains.
Contact vjs@rhyolite.com but not this spam trap.
