The psychic and the not-really-opt-in

I’ve been getting a continual stream of spam from a psychic. I blogged about it a few months ago, and even had a call with the psychic’s ESP. None of that seemed to matter. Every few days I’d get another ad for psychic candles, or recording services or whatever. It wasn’t mail I could easily filter, and every time I’d get it I’d growl and dump it in my junk folder.
Yesterday, I received another mail from her. The subject line is “list opt-in verification.” Really? Could she really be actually confirming her list? Actually asking if I want to continue receiving mail?

I’m sending this to you because everyone gets so many impersonal emails and I want to be sure you do want to receive the Tori Hartman Newsletter monthly. If you would like to continue to receive news from me, simply click the VERIFY link below.
Unsubscribe below will remove you permanently.
Thank you for your time and attention.
With Love,
Tori
You are receiving this email because you are currently subscribed to the distribution list ‘TH Marketing List 4.5.10’.

So far, so good. It seems she’s attempting to weed out folks from her list. But if you read below the fold, you find a paragraph that contradicts the entire mail.
The bottom paragraph says:

As part of our regular list maintenance procedures, we are requesting verification that you still want to receive our emails. Verification is optional. You will still continue to receive emails from this list if you choose not to verify your subscription unless you unsubscribe below.

Um. What? Why bother with a verification run? I don’t get it when companies do this. If you are going to keep mailing me no matter what I do, then why are you bothering me? This is the height of irrelevancy.
I know other companies have done this, but I don’t understand the point. If you aren’t going to pay attention to the non-response why are you asking the question?
Not only that, this mail doesn’t comply with CAN SPAM.

Signing up for lists
I want to avoid network outages

Related Posts

Important notification spammers break the law

I’m currently being inundated at multiple address with spam advertising spamming services. Most of these notices have the subject line: IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION. The text includes:

Read More

TWSD: My lunch is not spam

My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and ISPs.
Since the poster took the time to link to my blog, I thought I’d take the time to look in detail at his post and talk about how likely it is to work.

Read More

TWSD: keep spamming even when they say they'll stop

About a month ago I posted about receiving spam from a psychic attempting to sell me candles and stuff. The spammer was sending mail from a company called “Garden of Sound” using an ESP called OnLetterhead. A brief investigation led me to believe that unsubscribing from the mail was not going to do anything.
The post prompted an email from Scott B. the VP of Marketing of the company that is responsible for OnLetterhead. I replied to his email, pointing out a number of things he was doing that made his business look like an ESP front for spammers.
After he received my mail he called me to talk to me about the content of my post and the email and to assure me they were immediately implementing one of my suggestion (that they not put a generic “here’s how to unsubscribe” link on their 1000+ link domains, instead have those actually point to their AUP and corporate pages). He also assured me they took my complaint seriously and I would no longer be receiving email.
Guess what?
Garden of Sound is still spamming me from OnLetterhead. They’ve not even managed to implement the changes they pledged would be rolled out the same week as my blog post. Sure, the domain I’m getting spam from is different, the physical postal address is different, the product is different, the friendly from is different. But the preheader still says “this mail sent by Garden of Sound.” It’s all the same list, it’s all the same company, it’s all the same group of spammers.
Despite Scott’s attempt to convince me he wasn’t a spammer, it seems my initial impression was right. OnLetterhead is simply are a company attempting to look like they’re legitimate without actually taking any responsibility for the email going out from their network. They can’t even manage the bare minimum.
It’s companies like this that give the rest of ESPs a bad name.

Read More