This entry briefly explains Spamvertising and what to do if you receive a complaint.

What is Spamvertising?

Spamvertising is the practice of sending E-mail spam, advertising a website. In this case, it is a portmanteau of the words “spam” and “advertising”. Source:Wikipedia

Why am I receiving this notice?

When Limestone Networks receives an abuse complaint related to a server on your account we automatically notify you via a new ticket in our control panel. The subject of the ticket will read Spamvertised URL reported to be hosted on your account:.

What do I need to do?

Most of the time those who engage in spamvertising are sending the offending e-mail from a different server. What is being hosted on your server is the website that is being spamvertised. We ask that you remove the website from your server and notify us of your action by replying to the ticket. Alternative actions may include suspending the website and notifying your client.

Understanding the complaint

At the top of the each Spamvertised complaint is the following summary of information:

This lets you see easily everything you need to handle the complaint.

A few lines down you will see the start of the actual SpamCop complaint with [ SpamCop V4.5.0.102 ]. Below that will be the URL from SpamCop where you can mark the complaint as resolved. Sometimes the URL may not work (you get: can’t parse data, perhaps link was mangled.) and look like this:

Due to the formatting SpamCop sends their complaints in the link gets managed. In order to restore the link you need to remove the = sign and add the trailing z. The correct URL would be:

The information below this is a copy of the actual Spamvertised e-mail that was reported to SpamCop.