Buying lists and other stupid marketing tricks

Back in November, I commented on Zoominfo and that they were selling senders very bad lists. At that time, Zoominfo did not have my current information. They have since rectified that problem and are now selling my information to people.
This morning, I received an email that said:

I wanted to follow up on a previous email I sent out a couple days ago.  At Company, we offer an affordable, innovative, and in-depth marketing service that will  keep you one step ahead of your competitors.  Would you or a member of your team be interested in setting aside some time to see how this works?

I’d missed the first mail, apparently it had been generic enough (only the domain name in the subject line, and an unfamiliar name in the From: address) that I marked it as spam. It looked like a bunch of the other spam I get, it came to an address different than that on the website.
I asked the sender where he got my email address, he told me that he got it from Zoom Info. I kinda feel sorry for the guy, actually. He’s clearly some new sales guy who is just trying to make sales for his company (founded in 2008 according to their website). The problem is, his company is selling themselves as marketing experts, yet their expertise is questionable. The mail I was sent did not comply with CAN SPAM. It did not have an opt-out, nor did it have a physical postal address. Any VP of Sales in the online marketing space should know better than this.
The ironic bit of this is that the founder of this particular company is someone I’ve worked with in the past. If the email had even the slightest bit of personalization, “Hi, Laura, you worked with Our CEO at CEO’s Former Company, and we’re working on a new project we’d like to show you,” then I would have at least opened a dialog with the company. Even saying, “hey, I read your blog and would like to talk to you about our new product and see how it might work for you,” would have gotten a less chilly reception from me. Buying a list and sending a generic “let me tell you about my business model” email? Not so much.
Yes, Mr. VP of Sales, you are acting just like a spammer. This is what spammers do.

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TWSD: breaking the law

I tell my clients that they should comply with CAN SPAM (physical postal address and unsubscribe option) even if the mail they are sending is technically exempt. The bar for legality is so low, there is no reason not to.
Sure, there is a lot of spam out there that does not comply with CAN SPAM. Everything you see from botnets and proxies is in violation, although many of those mails do actually meet the postal address and unsubscribe requirements.
One of my spams recently caught my eye today with their disclaimer on the bottom: “This email message is CAN SPAM ACT of 2003 Compliant.” The really funny bit is that it does not actually comply with the law. Even better, the address it was sent to is not published anywhere, so the company could also be nailed for a dictionary attack and face enhanced penalties.
It reminds me of the old spams that claimed they complied with S.1618.

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Fake privacy policies

I sign up at a lot of websites and liberally spray email addresses across the net. These signups are on behalf of one customer or another and each webform gets its own tagged and tracked email address. I always have a specific goal with each signup: getting a copy of a customer’s email, checking their signup process, auditing an affiliate on behalf of a customer or identifying where there might be a problem in a process. Because I have specific goals, I am pretty careful with these signups and usually uncheck every “share my email address” box I can find on the forms.
In every case the privacy policies of my clients and the things they tell me are explicit in that addresses will not be shared. It’s all opt-in, and email addresses are not shared without permission. Even in the cases where I am auditing affiliates, my clients assure me that if I follow this exact process my address will not be shared. Or so the affiliates have assured them.
Despite my care and the privacy policies on the websites, these addresses occasionally leak or are sold. This is actually very rare, and most of the websites I test never do anything with my address that I don’t expect. But in a couple cases these email addresses have ended up in the hands of some hard core spammers (hundreds of emails a day) and there was no useful tracking I could do. In other cases the volume has been lower, and I’ve watched the progression of my email addresses being bought and sold with morbid fascination.
Today an address I signed up at a website about a year ago got hit with multiple spams in a short time frame. All came from different IPs in the same /24. All had different domains with no websites. Whois showed all the domains were registered behind a privacy protection service. Interestingly, two of the domains used the same CAN SPAM address. The third had no CAN SPAM address at all. None of these addresses match the data I have on file related to the email signup.
It never ceases to amaze me how dishonest some address collection outfits. Their websites state clearly that addresses will not be bought an sold, and yet the addresses get lots of spam unrelated to the original signup. For those dishonest enough to do this they’ll never get caught unless recipients tags and tracks all their signups. Even worse, unless their partners test their signups or their mailing practices, the partners may end up unwittingly sending spam.

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Two reasons not to buy a list

Ken Magill, celebrity, has two articles today that highlight the issue with buying lists from vendors. The first is yet another article about EmailAppenders selling bad data. In this case, it is not the buyers who are complaining. According to Ken EmailAppenders are sending out email advertising they can sell Internet Retailer’s list of 2008 conference attendees. Internet Retailer is disputing this and has sent EmailAppenders a cease and desist. EmailAppenders is currently dodging Ken’s attempts to get their side of the story.
The second is an article about Zoominfo, a new group in the list selling business. Zoominfo has long been harvesting information from other sites. Now, they are offering to sell their scraped and harvested list. Their only requirement is that the buyer sign an agreement to comply with CAN SPAM. And, yes, if someone is dumb enough to buy this harvested list, they should comply with CAN SPAM as sending mail to a harvested list triggers additional penalties if or when the FTC decides to go after the sender.
Not only are Zoominfo harvesting data, they are harvesting from ancient and obscure sources. They have no current information for me, but they managed to find an email address for a job I left in 1993. They have Steve listed as an employee of “postgreSQL INC” because they harvested the postgres mailing list archives. Mickey pointed out one of Zoominfo’s sources is http://free-personal-ads-wanted-sex-partner-near-hays-kansas.themasterwithin.ca/arch/4/. You do not even need to visit that site, just look at the URL!
Zoominfo’s VP and general manager claims they send emails to people regularly, offering them the chance to opt-out. First of all, I have never received one of these, have any of you? Secondly, some of the addresses are so old opt-outs are not relevant. Finally, unless they are monitoring their delivery, which I strongly doubt given their business model, anyone buying addresses from them is going to buy lots of dead addresses. And spamtraps. Lots of spamtraps.
I am sure that people who buy and sell lists regularly will tell me that these are outliers and that most companies who sell lists have higher data collection standards. My experience suggests that these are middle of the road list brokers. They are companies who are willing to sell anything with an @ sign in it and do not care about how sending to that data affects their customers.

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