Email appending

Mickey talks about appending and why it’s not a good practice.

There are a lot of companies out there who love using append strategies, and who find themselves changing email service providers three or four times a year — always hoping for “a bump in deliverability.”  I don’t think that there is any accident to that correlation.  They are doing something that results in enough complaints that their reputation is killed and they are forced to move elsewhere to try for a fresh star.

There is no permission associated with appending, so anyone using this as a technique to send mail is sending spam. And, yes, even when you’re doing an opt-in append. Unless the recipient has opted in to have their address in an appending database, that first mail to them is still spam.
Many recipients, including myself, deliberately do not provide senders with email addresses. Going and finding an email address that may or may not belong to that user is bypassing their choice. They opted-out by not opting in. Senders who use append to “fix” that “oversight” are no better than spammers.

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The dark side of email marketing

Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything.
Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct contact (that I know of) with any of the players on this end of things I have zero doubt that if they called me they would tell me that they were legitimate email marketers.
In one case, a members of a spam gang kidnapped the teenage daughter of someone investigating their activities. The gang held her for more than 5 years in horrific conditions. Yesterday Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error” posted on Boing Boing that his friend got his daughter back. It is a heartbreaking story and incredibly sobering.
In another case, the Russian police arrested a man who ran spammit.com, a clearinghouse for viagra sellers to find spammers to send their mail. Reports say that mail volumes dropped by a fifth after the site was taken offline.
There is real evil in the email marketing industry. Sure, they’re spammers and we can all stand up and say they’re not legitimate. But, this is what the ISPs and Spamhaus and law enforcement are dealing with on a regular basis.

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You want to sell me a list?

Over the years, some of my clients have found it expedient to give me email addresses at their domains. These addresses forward mail addressed to laura@clientsite to my own mailbox. Generally these are so I can be added to internal mailing lists and have access to their internal tools.
It’s often amusing to see the spam that comes through to those addresses. Over the last few weeks I’ve received multiple spams advertising an email appending service.
Let the irony sink in. An email appending service is sending me an email at a client company offering the client company the opportunity to append email addresses. “See how accurate our appending is!”
How accurate can a service be if they can’t even target their own spam correctly?
In addition to the appalling targeting they’re also violating CAN SPAM (no physical postal address), their website is a collection of broken links and they don’t provide any company name or information in the email or on the website.
To top it all off, the mail says, “if you’re not the right person to act on this mail, please forward this to the right person.” Followed by a standard legal disclaimer that says, “The information contained in this e-mail message and any attachments is confidential information intended only for the use of individuals or entities named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail at the originating address.”
I wonder if blogging about the utter email incompetence about mail from David Williams, Business Development (phone number: 800-961-5127) violates the confidentiality clause?

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More information on arrests

Terry Zink has a more detailed post on some of the spammer arrests and takedowns that have happened recently.
In addition to the events I mentioned yesterday, authorities arrested an Armenian man suspected of running the Bredolab botnet. Unfortunately, the arrest has not stopped the spam with the malware payload.
These are issues that many ISP abuse and postmaster desks deal with on a daily basis. Their filtering schemes and policies are in place to protect customers from the mob, and criminals. I don’t think enough marketers and senders understand exactly how much the ISPs are dealing with and why many ISPs don’t really care that “mail is taking 12 hours to get to the inbox.” They are dealing with much more important things.

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