RE: midrangenews.net

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: rob@xxxxxxxxx
> 
> We're teetering between iTera and Mimix HA lite.  I've been fighting
my
> boss hard to at least get him to look strong at iTera.  After all, how
> many customers switched to Mimix HA lite versus the opposite?  After
Joe's
> remarks I was tempted to back down.  But I decided I wouldn't.  Hey, I
> will probably be the one to support the decision made and the company
(and
> my) well being should come before my personal bias against a spammer.

Having talked to Bill Rice over at iTera, I'm convinced he's a standup
guy and that their company was picked "out of a hat" to give some sort
of iSeries credibility to this sleaze campaign.  As it turns out, the
folks at Asymex never heard of "Midrange News" either, and are equally
incensed.

Unfortunately, the sleaze may go deeper than that, and get really messy
really quickly.  The "newsletter" is obviously from a company pretty
well versed in email spam.  And while the midrangenews.net domain is
pretty well buried under the nom de web of David LaMarr, the Midrange
News folks made a little mistake: the email came from
midrangenews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Midrangenews.com is owned by Christopher Jones, who in turn owns Stellar
Debris, a company that specializes in web marketing.  This includes a
"mock newspaper" called the Houston Record, which is a marketing tool
for Bytware.  It gets worse for me, since Stellar Debris also does work
for MC Press, including (drum roll) an "e-Newsletter template".

This is going to be very ugly before it is done.

Joe