I don’t mean to name and shame, but I will

A few months ago, I made the mistake of signing up for a webcast that opted me in to getting continuous communicates from them about upcoming online seminars.

I was getting tired of all of these invites so I unsubscribed.

I kept getting more invites so I unsubscribed again.

I kept getting even more invites so I unsubscribed a third time!

And then I got more invites!

I got fed up with this sender – I won’t name them out loud but let’s just say that it rhymes with ‘RightTalk’. I finally ended up creating an Exchange Transport Rule (ETR) about two months ago:

PS C:\> Get-TransportRule -Identity "Block RightTalk" | fl Description

Description : If the message:
sender's address domain portion belongs to any of these domains: 'mail01.righttalk.net'

Take the following actions:
reject the message and include the explanation 'Stop spamming me I already unsubscribed three times' with the status code: '5.7.1'

As you can see, I am rejecting the message and bouncing it back to them (they send authenticated email so I am not concerned about sending backscatter) and I even tell them why I am doing this. Ever since I created that rule two months ago, I haven’t gotten any messages from them in my inbox.

<Relaxed sigh>

However, yesterday I decided to check whether or not they took the hint and actually unsubscribed me.

Nope.

PS C:\> Get-MailDetailTransportRuleReport -TransportRule "Block RightTALK"

Date      Subject
1/26/2016 1:31:32 PM Now on Demand: Take Control of Your 2016 Operations Budget with Fleet Management Technology
1/28/2016 7:49:00 PM On Demand: Take Control of Your 2016 Operations Budget with Fleet Management Technology

Even as recent as this past week, they are still sending me email. Neither unsubscribing nor bouncing their email has worked. As a customer of the Exchange Online service, I’m happy to not see these messages getting delivered to me. However, as a citizen of the Internet who fights spam for a living, I’m irritated that this sender does not unsubscribe me, nor do they do any sort of SMTP bounce processing.