On August 11, 2005, I had a couple of telephone conversations with someone apparently at Ventura IT. He never identified himself, not in the initial message on my answering machine nor in the subsequent telephone calls.
His concern is that some of his mail is being rejected by its targets. Note that the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domain names is not published as a DNS blacklist or any other form readily used by mail software. Any rejecting of mail from Ventura IT is surely the result of actions taken by its targets.
Ventura IT has its own group in the Rhyolite Software list of unwelcome domains because of this unsolicited bulk email message. He insists that I sent mail to him to initiate that contact. At the end of our conversations, he was going to look in his archives for the mail message that I sent him and call me again. He refused to believe that I had never contacted him. Perhaps he did not call back because could not find any mail messages from me.
He insisted that he does not send spam. Instead of scraping addresses from the Internet, he gets lists of "leads" he contacts only after "scanning" them. Perhaps by "scan" he mean "visually examine."
He said that the Google record NANAS resulted from something about an auto-responder.
He said that he had tried to contact me from his Hotmail account. Without spending more time searching logs than it is probably worth, I cannot verify that. However, a superficial check of my logs found this objection from 2004. (That file is a dccm logdir file.)
I was offended by his repeated insistence that we "do the same thing, custom programming and software consulting." That it is likely that what we eat and breath are more similar than what we do for a living is not what bothered me. Instead it was his claim that by publishing my blacklist, I am reducing my competition.
A couple hours after recording those recollections of the telephone calls, I encountered a mail message and then another message among the logs of mail rejected by the Rhyolite Software mail system. In them the person at Ventura IT apparently identifies himself as Jordan Older. Mr. Older apparently assumed that the entry in my list resulted from Shmuel Metz's NANAS report. Mr. Older also claimed that Mr. Metz had an "ongoing relationship via email" with Mr. Older. Mr. Metz and I disagree about many things, but I find it unlikely that Mr. Metz sent anything to Mr. Older or otherwise solicited anything from Mr. Older. It is possible that someone sent Mr. Older mail forged to appear to have been from Mr. Metz.
It is strange that unsolicited bulk mail advertisers usually believe third parties are responsible for their problems in delivering their messages. Why don't they ask the targets of their mail to adjust spam defenses to allow those messages? No great expertise is required to "whitelist" any sender regardless of DNS blacklists, web pages, or anything else published by third parties. Why does it never occur to them that their messages might be rejected because their targets have taken steps to not be contacted by the advertiser in particular? Making "cold calls" may require the assumption that the targets want to hear the advertising, but why cling to that assumption in the face of evidence to the contrary for individual targets?
Another strange thing is that unsolicited bulk mail advertisers cannot see how to convince me to remove their domain names and IP addresses from my list. For example, Mr. Older could have said that the spam advertising his enterprise was sent to me because his web pages once included a "contact-me" form and that someone must have tried to play a trick on him by causing him to send advertising to a known AntiCommerzeNetCopFlamer like me. Mr. Older might also have said that the junk I received came from an auto-responder or software answering to mail forged to have come from me and that he no longer uses auto-responders. I could not disprove such a claim. Given one spam in 3.5 years, I would have accepted and acted on it. Instead he tried to convince me that I had sent mail to him, as if someone with web pages as primitive and in such need of real design as these on a vanity domain name that dates from at least 1991 would have sense enough to be interested in professional web site design. When I did not accept the implausible claim that I had sent him mail, he implied that my motives involve restraint-of-trade and predatory-competition.
Oh, well, as they say
you-are-senile-2
Our mail advertisement was not spam. You have forgotten that you sent mail asking for it.
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.
