This is what can happen when you trust your customers to spell their email addresses correctly at the cash register... Ref: SBL168921 74.122.218.103/32 is listed on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) 2012-12-10 22:41:07 GMT | SR21 | epsilon.com macys.com (Receipts to spamtraps?!) 12/10/2012: To clarify, the issue with these receipts isn't simply that one-off receipts are being sent to typoed email addresses. That issue would be trivial if no further email were sent to those email addresses, even during the Christmas shopping season. The issue is that typoed email addresses are being associated with customer accounts and receiving all sorts of email (transactional and marketing both) without ever being confirmed. This sort of thing is happing a great deal in the past month or two. We suspect that the cause is rushed sales clerks who gather the email addresses at the cash register, either typing them in manually there or writing them down and typing them in at the end of their shift. Either process is fraught with errors. Many typoed email addresses never bounce, because they exist, but they also do not belong to the customer. They might be spamtraps, or they might belong to other people. We see the email to our spamtraps, but how many innocent users also receive ongoing email from Macy's and other companies (usually retailers) in error? This issue needs to be addressed: by Macy's, and by other companies that are sending significant amounts of email to typoed email addresses. One solution would be to not send additional email to email addresses gathered at a point of sale for receipts. Simply send the receipt, then discard the email address. Another solution, if you want to send follow-up email to those email addresses, would be to confirm those email addresses before adding them to the customer account. That way, if the customer provided an incorrect email address or the clerk mistyped the email address when adding it to the database, the email address would receive only the initial receipt and (perhaps) a confirmation request. 12/09/2012: Macys.com, which has a serious ongoing issue with spam, is sending receipts to two spamtraps! These receipts appear to be transactional responses to sales, but they are multiple nearly identical copies of the same email being sent to email addresses whose owners did not request the email. We suspect a serious problem with bad point-of-sale email address acquisition, probably typos. These email addresses need to be confirmed BEFORE they are used, because otherwise Macy's is sending unsolicited bulk email
That's crazy...I don't understand why they would list that. A typo should not result in an SBL even more so for transactional email.
LOL spamhaus LOL SR21 must have gotten rejected while hitting on a cashier at macys and is trying to get her fired. LOL.
I understand the need/want for a closed-loop email system.. somebody expresses an interest, leaves their email, and you send them a confirmation message. The problem is, this doesn't always work for transactionals, just some ideas off the top of my head: 1. With a shared email. Mrs. Jones wants that Macy's catalog in her email, so she gives her email to the lady at the register, and Mr. Jones the next day sees the confirmation email and says "WTF is this crap" and deletes the message. The potential business relationship between Macy's and Mrs. Jones has been forever severed. 2. Mrs. Jones gives her email address, but is extremely paranoid. Upon looking at the confirmation email, she thinks, "What if this is some scam, some fake Macy's site trying to get my information" and deletes the email. Closed loop is nice in theory, and while I understand and support it, a business will lose a more than marginal chunk of its original signups going this route
http://blog.wordtothewise.com/ has two reasonable posts on the front page on how to deal with unconfirmed transactional mail
