Wandering Thoughts archives

Red Hat has really doubled down on being email spammers

Back in June, I wrote about how we'd gotten marketing email from Red Hat to a RHN contact address. At the time I wrote an angry complaint email to Red Hat about it, from my core email address. This is the only time I have given Red Hat my core email address; it is not, for example, the address I use on their Bugzilla.

On November 10th, I got the following email message from Red Hat, once again from their very own SMTP server:

From noreply@engage.redhat.com Tue Nov 10 [...]
Received: from mail01.engage.redhat.com ([204.92.22.83]) [...]
[...]
From: "Red Hat" <email@engage.redhat.com>
Subject: Win a complimentary pass to RSA Conference in Nov. 18 virtual event

If you're looking for a reason to register for Secure Foundations for Today and Tomorrow | A Red Hat virtual event, look no further. In the virtual event on November 18, you'll hear from Red Hat executives, technical experts, and IKEA, and learn more about: [...]

There are no polite words for a company that takes email addresses that have sent abuse complaints to them and recycles those email addresses into their mailing lists as fresh addresses. Such a company is a spammer, period, full stop.

So: Red Hat are email spammers.

Sic transit gloria mundi, and all that. There was a time when I would have believed that Red Hat would never do this, that it had far too many principles to even get close to this. Clearly I was wrong, and I guess I found out how far Red Hat was willing to go (as I wondered in my initial entry).

I sent another email complaint, because somehow I am still an optimist. It has been almost a month and just as the first time, I have had exactly no response from Red Hat. Dead silence to abuse complaints is of course another sign of a spammer, so I shouldn't be surprised.

(Sending out your email with a 'noreply' address is of another one of those signs. Real mailing list software uses envelope senders to track bounces and handle them; software that is never going to remove email addresses when they bounce obviously has no need for such niceties.)

I haven't gotten any further marketing spam messages from Red Hat, but I expect it's only a matter of time (and thus I expect to someday write a third entry to confirm that it's happened). If they continue it long enough, 2017 will be an interesting year.

Sidebar: Who engage.redhat.com appears to be

While various pieces of information (such as good reverse DNS) ties this to Red Hat with Red Hat's active cooperation, Red Hat appears to have outsourced part of their spamming to something called eloqua.net, aka en25.com, aka eloqua.com. To quote the latter's website, this is 'Oracle's B2B Cross-Channel Marketing solution'. There is some moderate irony in that, but I suppose that for both Oracle and Red Hat, money is money.