Watch those role accounts

Ben at Mailchimp has a post up explaining what role accounts are and why mailing to them can be a problem.

role addresses are built for functions, not people…

If you read down in the comments you will see that they talk about how some people do use role accounts for their subscriptions. Small businesses might have a limited number of email accounts with their hosting, so they use info@ or sales@ to sign up to lists. But, in many cases, sales@ and info@ addresses are intended for use by people who want to purchase from a particular company. Not for use by people who want to market to that company.
Be wary of role accounts on your mailing lists. Too many of them and compliance desks are going to start thinking your list may not be opt-in.

RPost and Goodmail settle lawsuit
Are you still thinking of purchasing a mailing list?

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ESPs leaking email addresses

Two of my tagged email addresses started getting identical pharma spam over the weekend. It is annoying me because I am now getting spam in a mailbox that was previously spam free. The spam is overwhelming the real traffic and I am having to make some decisions about what to do with the email addresses and their associated accounts with the companies I gave them to.
One thing I did notice, though, is that both companies use iContact as their ESP. A cursory check of my other mailboxes shows that none of my other tagged addresses are mailed through iContact. I don’t think it’s very likely that these two individual, unrelated companies made deals with the same spammers to sell address lists at the same time. It’s much more likely that there was a compromise somewhere and address lists were stolen.
Edit: Checked my other account and, likewise, I’m getting the same spam to a 3rd address serviced by iContact. I’ve sent mail to all 3 companies involved and we’ll see how they react.
And, as I was thinking about this, iContact just laid off a bunch of staff about the same time they announced their partnership with Goodmail. Based on past history with companies in this situation, it seems possible this is a disgruntled former employee. I’ve also seen reports from other people noticing spam to addresses given to iContact customers.

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TWSD: Using FOIA requests for email addresses

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There isn’t permission associated with this and the commercial company has no pretense that the recipients want to receive mail from them. This is a bad idea and a bad way to get email addresses and is no better than spammers scraping addresses from every website mentioning “fishing” or “hunting.”

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20M leads a month

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20M “opt-in” leads a month is roughly 650,000 leads a day.

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