After 9 years of running Word to the Wise, we’re taking a vacation. A really-o, truly-o vacation that doesn’t involve stealing a couple days before a conference or business meeting or visiting family. Also no internet and no email. I’m not even taking my laptop (I am taking my iPad, but it’s an awesome game machine). I’ll be back to posting when I get back into the...
Apparently mentioning “affiliate” in a blog post brings out the blog spammers. I’ve had dozens of trackbacks on yesterday’s how to avoid affiliate spam. Oh, the irony. A bucket of announcements came out over the last week. The uber smart folks at Mailchimp have a new iPad app called Chimpadeedoo. This app lets merchants collect email addresses at the point of sale, on an...
How can companies avoid paying spammers and having their brand associated with spammers? One of the easiest ways to avoid spam is to not pay for acquisition email. Simply don’t set up an affiliate email marketing program. There are a lot of folks who don’t like me saying that, and who have argued vociferously with me over the years. But email is not a good medium for acquiring new...
Over the last week Steve and I have posted about the AARP hiring affiliates to send spam on their behalf: starting with the poorly done email message, moving through the process of identifying the responsible entity and then walking through the details of how we tracked the spammer. Why spend a week writing about the AARP spamming? I initially posted about the AARP spam because it was such a...
or Why All Of This Is Meaningless: Guest post by Huey Callison The analysis of the AARP spam was nice, but looking at the Mainsleaze Spammer Playbook, I can make a few educated guesses at what happens next: absolutely nothing of consequence. AARP, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say “It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous lead-gen...
Yesterday I showed how major companies hire hard core spammers. Today I’m going to show you some of the technical details as to how I found that data. This is a fairly quick and shallow analysis, the sort of thing I’d typically do for a client to help them decide whether the case was worth pursuing before expending too much money and time on investigation and legal paperwork...
On Tuesday Laura wrote about receiving spam sent on behalf of the AARP. The point she was discussing was mostly just how incompetent the spammer was, and how badly they’d mangled the spam such that it was hardly legible. One of AARPs interactive advertising managers posted in response denying that it was anything to do with the AARP. This isn’t from AARP…this is a SPAM that’s been going...
Yesterday I wrote about spam I received advertising AARP and used it as an example of a mainstream group supporting spammers by hiring them (or hiring them through proxies) to send mail on their behalf. My statement appears to have upset someone, though. There is one comment on the post, coming from an IP address allocated to the AARP. This isn’t from AARP…this is a SPAM that’s been going around...
I received spam advertising AARP recently. Yes, AARP. Oh, of course they didn’t send me spam, they hired someone who probably hired someone who contracted with an affiliate marketer to send mail. The affiliates, while capable of bypassing spam filters, are incapable of actually sending readable mail. That’s actually how the message appeared in my mail client: totally unreadable images...
There is still a bit of discussion going on around the HBR article on how B2B mail should be opt-out not opt in on various delivery blogs. Over on the Blue Sky Factory blog new daddy (congratulations!) DJ writes a post about why he thinks opt-out in any context is a poor marketing decision. One of his commenters follows up with a long comment about how recipients shouldn’t get angry when...
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