Buying Lists

One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM.
As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me.
I can report nothing has changed. He’s still violating CAN SPAM. He’s still claiming I have no right to post, share, spindle, mutilate or fold his spam. Well, in the interest in something, I thought I’d share the whole post this time. Just to warn folks from attempting to purchase services from appendleads.com (nice website, by the way).

From: David Williams <davidw@appendleads.com>
Subject: Targeted Email Lists
Date: July 8, 2010 11:17:36 AM PDT
To: Me@client.example.com
Hi Laura,
Would you like to reach your specific target audience in a cost effective, hassle free way? Have you grown tired of dialing the phone only to get another voicemail, an aggressive gatekeeper or “can you call back in 10 minutes” only to find they’re gone for the day? We make it easy to reach your specific target audience, whether you need to reach sales and marketing executives, CEO’s, director’s of HR or anyone in between.
Also, we offer email append services. If you use an in-house database but it does not include emails or the emails are out of date, we will append the emails in less than 1 weeks time. Out of site is out of mind, never let your client’s lose sight of you. To know how it works we offer email append test at no cost, so send us 50 to 100 contacts with just contact & company names in a spread sheet and we will provide the emails within 24 hours.
Reach out to hundreds of thousands of contacts with our ready to use email list or we can custom build a list based on your specific requirements. Our lists include contact name, title and email address, plus company name, postal address, phone, fax, SIC code, NAICS, employees, revenue and more. Let me know your specific target audience and a few free samples will be sent for your review.
Our objective is to help you to reach your target audience more effectively and economically. Let me know if you or someone else in your organization is responsible for such a decision.Your time and effort in referring me to someone will be appreciated.
Warm Regards,
David Williams
Lead Generation Specialist
Phone: +1 800-961-5127
NOTE: If you feel you have received this message by accident, or if you want to be deleted from further communications from me, please reply in the subject remove or opt-out.
This communication (including any attachments) may contain legally privileged and confidential information and is intended for a specific individual and purpose. If you are not the intended recipient, disclosing, copying, distributing, or taking any action based on this message is strictly prohibited.

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Are you still thinking of purchasing a mailing list?

Last week there was an article published by btobonline promoting the services of a company called Netprospex. Netprospex, as you can probably gather from their company name, is all about the buying and selling of mailing lists. They will sell anyone a list of prospects.
The overall theme of the article is that there is nothing wrong with spam and that if a sender follows a few simple rules spamming will drive business to new heights. Understandably, there are a few people who disagree with the article and the value of the Netprospex lists.
I’ve stayed out of the discussion, mostly because it’s pretty clear to me that article was published solely to promote the Netprospex business, and their point of view is that they make more money when they can convince people to purchase lists from them. Dog bites man isn’t a very compelling news story. Data selling company wants you to buy data from them isn’t either.
They are right, there is nothing illegal about spam. Any sender can purchase a list and then send mail to the addresses on that list and as long as that sender meets the rock bottom standards set out in CAN SPAM. As long as your mail has an opt-out link, a physical postal address and unforged headers that mail is legal. The only other obligation on the sender is to honor any unsubscribe requests within ten days. So, yes, it is legal to send spam.
But legal action isn’t the only consequence of spamming. Today I received the following in an email from a colleague.

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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.
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