The too many.
The stupid.
The spammers.
The blog spammers are still actively attempting to get their claws into my blog. Today the comments included:
marketing is my specialty becuse i like to promote new products”‘:
lead generation is the key to becoming a very successful internet marketer,~~
The only sensible thing to do is refer the commenter to today’s XKCD:
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.
I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices.
Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have customers sending spam. In either case, I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices and what we all mean when we talk about best practices. In conversing with various people it’s clear that the term doesn’t mean what the speakers think it means.
For me, best practice means sending mail in a way that create happy and engaged recipients. There are a lot of details wrapped up in there, but all implementation choices stem from the answer to the question “what will make our customers happy.” But a lot of marketers, email and otherwise, don’t focus on what makes their recipients or targets happy.
In fact, for many people I talk to when they say “best practice” what they really mean is “send as much mail as recipients will tolerate.” This isn’t that surprising, the advertising and marketing industries survive by pushing things as far as the target will tolerate (emphasis added).
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:
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