Opinion

Newegg continues to spam

Dec 14th

Posted by mike in Email

On December 8th, 2010, the employee spammed in the last post and a new employee were sent unsolicited email (spam) by Newegg. So now that’s 3 email addresses, and while I was a customer of Newegg in the past, I have never used my work email address with them, and the other 2 people recently spammed have never been a customer of Newegg ever.

Both users received the exact same message (minus the user-identifiable link modifications).

The user who had been spammed before had been assured after calling them that he had been removed from their mailing list, but obviously that was a lie.

I can not see any reason to do business with Newegg.

Sure, prices seem to be good and there are many good reviews of their shipping and response to RMA issues, but at what cost?

Personally, I will never shop with Newegg again and I encourage anyone reading this to stop purchasing from such an abusive company. They aren’t Internet friendly and seem to feel that they have some kind of right to invade your mailbox, whether you have dealt with them in the past ornot.

Bad company is bad. Just saying.

Horse: dead, too bad Newegg spam isn’t yet :(

SPAM

Newegg sends spam, can not learn from previous mistakes

Nov 18th

Posted by mike in Email

2 comments

I know that for many, Newegg is a great place to buy things.

I can no longer in good conscience recommend or advocate using NewEgg as a provider of your computing and electronic needs.

Let me step back a bit, back to August 18th, 2010 and August 30th, 2010 when I received unsolicited email (in this case, pure and outright spam) from Newegg. I had posted this on my personal blog (which doesn’t get much traffic/eyes overall) as I felt it was just a personal issue to deal with.

But today, out of nowhere, one of my employees received unsolicited email from Newegg and the best part? It is pedaling the same small 120GB disk drive that the messages I received in August, 2010!

I have an idea as to the avenue that Newegg is using to gather/borrow/steal/purchase new email addresses and I am not willing to post it publicly at this time, but I can say that salesforce.com is the owner of this breach of trust. I do hope I am wrong as salesforce.com has a decent reputation. But then again, so did Newegg…

And without further adieu – the PDF of the headers…

20101118-newegg-spam

My personal view: I do not do business with companies that spam and will never do business with Newegg again after the initial round of spam. I’ll now be working internally to make sure that we, as a company, do not use Newegg ever again in the future and advocating to the employees that they boycott Newegg for future purchases as well.

SPAM

DNS MX vs IPv4 & IPv6

Nov 12th

Posted by mike in Networking

1 comment

Yesterday – a very interesting issue cropped up…

Another local provider had email warnings being generated that they could not connect to our frontend MX servers.

The error itself was:

IPv6 is not supported

Which is not very clear for a reason email can not be delivered. I mean, my systems are working fine with IPv6 and we have native IPv6 connections occurring regularly.

So I scour our logs looking for case-insensitive ‘ipv6′ and all I find are hostnames with that listed, no errors, nothing with the word ‘supported’ listed.

The other provider thinks that maybe it is an issue on their side, which looks to be right, but for a different reason. Speculation: Their mail servers were trying IPv6 connections but were (at the time of discussion) not necessarily configured to handle IPv6 connections. No route (and router) for IPv6 means error. This makes sense.

But the culprit looks to be how different resource records are handled, and a probable mistake by me (humans…).

More >

Postfix

Xfinity vs Hulu direct – what’s up?

Nov 7th

Posted by mike in Opinion

No comments

So, Xfinity, the new name for the Comcast triple play, is using Hulu as the backend content provider.

What could go wrong? Oh, maybe the video quality will be 1/2 of what Hulu provides directly!

Could be that Comcast is re-compressing the data and I have included the screen captures to prove it. If Comcast isn’t re-compressing (and I don’t know/have the technology to check on this, sorry folks!), it is at least sending a very subpar version of it over the Internet connection provided by Comcast to my home.

I tried to get the same second, same frame, but it was almost impossible. These screen captures are about the same second, but are not the same frame unfortunately, but should be close enough for comparisons sake.

UPDATE: While at work before leaving, I decided to redo this to see if I could get closer and as luck would have it, I was able to snag the screen captures on what looks to be very close to the same frame. Comparison is much easier this time, though this computer I did the screen captures from isn’t as clean, but it is more apples to apples.

I won’t be using Xfinity to watch any type of television at this rate, and I don’t pay for Hulu Plus, and unfortunately, NetFlix doesn’t have current television episodes available for DVD or streaming so a third comparison is impossible right now. I’d rather burn my limited 250GB on higher quality video than what I have seen on Xfinity.

Here is Xfinity (provided by Hulu, provided on Fancast) and directly from Hulu, click the images for the full size (1680×1050) resolution as captured on my MacBook Pro.