Ticketmaster, aside from being an evil purveyor of "convenience" fees aka "ha ha monopoly" fees, is also proving to be quite the spammer, and demonstrating ably how not to handle e-mail marketing.

I bought tickets a few months ago on ticketmaster, and specifically opted out of any "special offers" they had listed. Nonetheless, they started sending me regular mail, which I specifically unsubscribed from (despite the fact that I never subscribed, which makes them a spammer).

Today I got another message from them. You can find a full copy of the message here. A very odd message. The sender is in the headers is "Concert.News" <concert .News@aeglive-la.com> -- not Ticketmaster. The return-path is v-floae_feoipmfd_gnpabb_a@bounce3.rm04.net.

The body of their message repeatedly references URLs at "rm04.net", whatever that is. A piece of advice repeatedly given to users is to never trust URLs in an e-mail message that don't reference a domain that matches the sender -- i.e. ticketmaster.com. Aside from the fact that this message is spam it also looks essentially like your run of the mill malicious phishing message.

I don't know what the logic at Ticketmaster is regarding this message -- if they think that by sending from this "aeglive-la.com" domain instead they can somehow avoid culpability for it or something. The reality is that I gave Ticketmaster the cwage-ticketmaster@quietlife.net address, at which I now receive spam, either from them or someone else.

Ticketmaster is a spammer.

Comments

AEG Live (based in LA, with

AEG Live (based in LA, with an office here) is the promoter of each of those shows - my guess... well, it's not a guess... is that they have obtained the list from Ticketmaster in order to market directly to folks who purchased tickets to a concert comparable to one of the shows listed. My assumption is that TM has included you in their opt-out list for their mailings, but hasn't actually removed your email address from the raw list.

Not condoning the activity - just trying to fill in the blanks on who the actual players are and why you're receiving their email.