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"

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.