Who are you and why are you mailing me?

I’ve mentioned here before that I use tagged addresses whenever I sign up for. This does help me mentally sort out what’s real spam and what’s just mail I’ve forgotten I’ve signed up for.
Yesterday, I received and email from e-fense.com thanking me for my interest in their new product. The mail came to a tagged address, but not a tag that I would have given to e-fense.com. Their opening paragraph said:

First of all, thank you for your interest regarding e-fense and our family of products…

The family of products in question appears to be security and forensics tools. Not something I would sign up to receive information about. The tagged email address points to the eventbee.com website. I don’t have any other email to the address I gave to eventbee. So I’m not sure who this company is or why they think I signed up to receive mail from them.
In all likelihood  this is just some marketer being stupid. I vaguely remember signing up for something at eventbee recently, although I don’t remember what it is, or if e-fense was related to it. After a little investigation, I come to the conclusion this is a stupid marketer that has access to event signup data and added all those email addresses to their mailing list.
I’m willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt so instead of sending a complaint or anything I decide to send them email. I notice the first problem: the visible email address in the footer has a different email address in the mailto: link. I decide to send my question to both addresses, just to be sure it gets to someone who can answer my question. I sent:

Can you tell me what your connection to eventbee is and where you got the email address laura-eventbeeCF at mydomain.com

I discover a second problem. The address in the mailto: link doesn’t exist. The other address seems to have delivered, but I have yet to receive a response from Mr. Vinall. That’s OK, I wasn’t necessarily expecting a response right away.
Then today, I discovered a third problem. They’ve moved to an ESP and are sending out more marketing mail. Daily mail from a sender I never subscribed to? Not good. Daily mail from a sender I never requested email from claiming I signed up to their list? Even worse. I’ve dropped an email to abuse@ the ESP and already gotten a reply. If they are enforcing their policies as their response to me says, then I expect not to hear from them again.
I’ve been around long enough, and I’m willing to cut both the company and the ESP a little slack. But, most normal people would have hit “this is spam” when receiving this mail. In fact, I say email that starts with “thank you for your interest” in a product I’ve never heard of from a company I don’t recognize is clearly spam.
Could this have been handled better? Absolutely.
How would I advise a client to do this better?
Send a shorter email introducing your company to the recipient, tell them why they’re receiving this email and offer them the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletters.

Hi, this is e-fense. You recently signed up for an event at the santa clara convention center. We’d like the opportunity to introduce our products and our company to you. We offer product that does insert product functionality here. If you’d like more information about our company, please visit our website at URL here. If you would like to receive our newsletters in the future please click here to subscribe.

See? Now I know why you’re emailing me. I can look at your product, I can visit your website. I can subscribe to receive your newsletter. Sure, some people might still report the mail as spam, but a lot fewer people will do it now than when you started off unexpected, unwanted and unasked for email with “thank you for your interest in our product…”

Related Posts

TWSD: Run, hide and obfuscate

Spammers and spamming companies have elevated obfuscating their corporate identities to an artform. Some of the more dedicated, but just this side of legal, spammers set up 3 or 4 different front companies: one to sell advertising, one or more to actually send mail, one to get connectivity and one as a backup for when the first three fail. Because they use rotating domain names and IP addresses all hidden behind fake names or “privacy protection services”, the actual spammer can be impossible to track without court documents.
One example of this is Ken Magill’s ongoing series of reports about EmailAppenders.
Aug 5, 2008 Ouch: A List-Purchase Nighmare
Sept 9, 2008 Umm… About EmailAppenders’ NYC Office
Sept 15, 2008 E-mail Appending Plot Thickens
Nov 11, 2008 EmailAppenders Hawking Bogus List, Claims Publisher
Dec 23, 2008 Internet Retailer Sues EmailAppenders
Feb 1, 2009 EmailAppenders Update
Mar 10, 2009 Another Bogus E-mail List Claimed
April 14, 2009 EmailAppenders a Court No-Show, Says Internet Retailer
April 21, 2009 EmailAppenders Gone? New Firm Surfaces
May 5, 2009 EmailAppenders Back with New Web Site, New Name
Their actions, chronicled in his posts, are exactly what I see list providers, list brokers and “affiliate marketers” do every day. They hide, they lie, they cheat and they obfuscate. When someone finally decides to sue, they dissolve one company and start another. Every new article demonstrates what spammers do in order to stay one step ahead of their victims.
While Ken has chronicled one example of this, there are dozens of similar scammers. Many of them don’t have a persistent reporter documenting all the company changes, so normal due diligence searches fail to turn up any of the truth. Companies looking for affiliates or list sources often fall victim to scammers and spammers, and suffer delivery and reputation problems as a result.
Companies that insist on using list sellers, lead generation companies and affilates must protect themselves from these sorts of scammers. Due diligence can be a challenge, because of the many names, domains and businesses these companies hide behind. Those tasked with investigating affiliates, address sources or or mailing partners can use some of the same investigative techniques Ken did to identify potential problems.

Read More

Suppressing email addresses: it's good for everyone

Every sender, big or small, should have the ability to suppress sending to any particular email address. They must, absolutely, be able to stop sending mail to anyone for any reason. Not only is this a legal requirement in every jursidiction that has laws about email marketing, it’s just good business sense.
What happens when marketers fail to be able to suppress email addresses? At some point they’re going to mail someone who gets annoyed enough with them to make it public that they are too incompetent to run an email program.
This happened to the folks over at spamfighter.com recently. They have been spamming Neil Schwartzman (spamfighter, Executive director of CAUCE North America, Director of Standards and Certification at ReturnPath) since somewhere in 2007. Yes, really, 2007. Neil has asked them politely to stop spamming him. He’s explained he’s not actually using their software. They appear to be incapable of running a suppression list, despite telling him 3 times that they have removed his address.
Showing much more restraint than I would have with a sender who couldn’t stop sending me email, Neil gave them years to fix their process before blogging about his experiences. Instead of fixing their broken process they instead responded to his blog post insisting their mail wasn’t spam because they weren’t sending Viagra mail or 3rd party offers.
We can argue about the definition of opt-in, we can argue about whether registration is permission, we can argue about a lot of things, but when the recipients says “stop sending me email” and a sender says “we’ll stop sending you email” and then fails to actually stop sending email I think the recipient is fully justified in calling the email spam. Sorry spamfighter.com, your process is broken and your inability to fix it 2 years after the brokenness was brought to your attention does not give anyone a good impression.
Every email sender should have the ability to stop sending mail to recipients. If that’s not currently possible with your technology, it should be a very high development priority.

Read More

How to devalue your mailing lists

This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam.
Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged address that I only gave to Adobe. Sure enough, it’s Adobe and ESPN co-branded spam about college basketball sent to an Adobe list.
Down at the bottom of the email there’s a blob of tiny illegible text, in very pale grey on white. Buried in there is an opt-out link: “If you’d prefer not to receive e-mail like this from Adobe in the future, please click here to unsusbscribe“.
I’d prefer not to receive college sports spam from anyone, including Adobe, so I click on it and find a big empty white webpage with this in the middle of it:

Read More