The 376 Spam Emails Deadline Hollywood Sent in Less than 2 Weeks

Over the last few weeks, I was chatting with other people on the Frantech matrix server about a dodgy anti-DDOS provider named; Bytefend.

Strangely, the people on that matrix server who were about the dodgy goings on with Bytefend, including DDOS attacks against Frantech and others and their hosting of Doxbin, would become victims of a newsletter bombing campaign.

Yes, many websites spread the misinformation that newsletter bombing is only used to hide online fraud.

Deadline Hollywood and their lack of Double opt-in

Cleaning up from a newsletter bombing campaign should be simple. Just delete the spam. Should be simple as the newsletter has not received permission from me to send me any more email as I have clicked no links to confirm a double opt-in.

This is, however, not the case for all websites.

The worst example and today’s blog post is about Deadline (or Deadline Hollywood). A website that appears to cover the boring and unoriginal world of Hollywood gossip, not something I am interested in as someone who hates celebrity culture.

On 19th September 2021, a spammer signed-up one of my lesser used email accounts to receive emails from Deadline. The first email confirming the subscription did not ask me to confirm my subscription, instead Deadline just presumes that I was the person who sign-up.

I did not even spot that first email at first, as I just reported all the emails sent in the newsletter bombing as spam and moved on. If anyone thinks it’s wrong to report these emails as spam, then ask webmasters to better protect their email subscription forms.

The next day, when I noticed that 22 emails from Deadline had arrived in my spam folder.

Yes, they sent 22 emails the day after I had reported them as spam. In fact, Deadline have so-far have sent me 376 emails in total after being reported as spam.

I don’t see why I should have to unsubscribe from a newsletter that I never subscribed to in the first place and consider all these emails as spam. I have now written to Salesforce abuse about the spam and hope they will take action against Deadline.

In closing, to Deadline; Don’t send me hundreds of emails without my fucking permission, you twats.

Published: 2nd October 2021