Last week, a Robert S. Siegel (profile on Uni website) sent out Scientific Spam through the ESP Constant Contact, asking recipients to Join [Him] at GW’s Hematology & Medical Oncology Best Practices.

We asked Dr. Siegel to detail the origins of the mailing list, cc’ing Postmaster. Postmaster bounced, so we cc’d the role address found in the domain registration for gwu.edu. All we’ve got so far is a L-SOFT confirmation that the message was distributed to the members of the role account mailing list. No response from Doctor, nothing from the University admins, and nothing from Constant Contact.

Today, more spam (Register Today for GW’s Oncology Update), so we listed gwu.edu on our RHSBL. We didn’t list Constant Contact’s domain name or IP range(s) yet, but given more non-responses and more spam, that could be in the cards too.

It’s regrettable that we have to resort to measures against one of our own, as it were (with several hundred addresses on Scientific Spammers’ lists that we know of), but sending Scientific Spam to colleagues is just as objectionable as sending 419 spam to mugus. Or at least we think so.