McAfee spamming products and websites to webmasters?

In the last week or so I received an email from:

Nicholas_DiSabato@mcafee.com

His name is Nick DiSabato and he works for McAfee. His first email was to the whois contact on one of my domain names which said this:



After further discussion with Nick I found that all he was trying to do (on McAfee's behalf) was sell a product for their website mcafeesecure dot com. I was a little shocked to see such a reputable company using questionable spamming practices. How is this better than any other spammers out there? They wasted my time trying to sell me a useless product that I do not want contacting me via spamming.

Is it just me and I am over-reacting? It really irks me when I get spammed, and I thought I would post about it since I was shocked that McAfee is using questionable practices by harvesting emails from domain whois contacts to try and sell their products. Really sad in my opinion.

Wow. Last ditch effort to save a sad company? In all actuality though, I wonder where they're pulling their stats. Surely they're filtering that by traffic levels, but regardless, that's shady - and precisely why I always took the option of keeping my info back and letting my hosts put their info on it.

I use Gmail for the whois contacts because they are pretty good about stopping the spam. Alot of spammers will harvest whois records for emails, however Gmail is pretty good about not letting any of it through.

I wanted to ensure that someone who really needed to contact me could find a way to get ahold of me if for some reason they couldn't figure it out through our websites. For the most part Gmail is spam free even though I have that address listed on the whois contact. However, an email from mcafee came through normally probably because it wouldn't be expected that a reputable domain like that would be spamming, yet they are.

Interesting
http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-972-963-8000



It's also interesting that there's very little on search results for WSG. Also Mcafee doesn't even list them as a partner


What's also interesting is McAfee is headquartered in Santa Clara California.
Their Customer Service office is in Plano Texas. I recognized the area code right off as a Dallas Tx area code (972), and it's one that Plano uses. I seriously doubt their customer service office would be making sales calls. The phone number is listed as being in Frisco Tx which is just outside of Plano. The Plano Offices are at 5000 Headquarters Drive on the west side of Plano and you can see the rather large building clear as a bell in Google Earth where as Frisco is predominantly residential and several miles north of the corporate offices. The phone number is also an unplublished number.

My guess is he's a reseller.

//I assume this is what he was trying to sell you? http://www.mcafee.com/us/local_content/ ... siness.pdf

Can anybody use mcAfee email addresses though? His McAfee email works which to me makes me think he is representing that company on his behalf.

Could be legitimately part of McAfee. Perhaps they have that available for resellers? Anytime I've ever seen a McAfee email address though, it's always *@mcafeesecure.com For example, even at the bottom of that white paper, you can see the email address is info@mcafeesecure.com

On the bottom of this page:



All sorts of email addresses that are @mcafee.com

Name mentioned here: http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-972-963-8000

ATNO beat you to that UPSGuy.

Yup, so he did. Thinking of changing my handle to 'echo', what do you think?

I see someone else agreed it was time for an avatar change. Love stewie - nice one!

[offtopic]it's from the best stewie scene ever when he decides he is going to kill "new Brian", YouTube it if you haven't seen it[/offtopic]

haha, thanks for that.

From what I can find, Mcafee affiliate programs go through LinkSynergy, a 3rd party affiliate manager. It doesn't look like there's anything setup which would let people just grab a mcafee address on a whim.

Even the "forward this to a colleague" via email things on articles appear to be going through 3rd party domains so even if there were, ironically, a hole in one of them, it probably wouldn't look like it was coming from Mcafee.

Mcafee has some email protection services, which I thought might give anyone who signs up an @mcafee.com facade. That seems a little far out there though. I couldn't see that happening when I ponder it for a minute.

I think the giveaway here, is whether there are any tracking codes in the communications from these addresses. Someone working directly for Mcafee isn't going to need to make sure you go through tracking. A partner or affiliate is though so they can make sure they get credit.