It's Wednesday – do you know where your sales staff are?

I received an email yesterday with the subject “Please confirm your lunch reservation”. It didn’t look like a typical spam subject line, but wasn’t from anywhere I recognized.
I take a look.

I’ve reserved a seat for you (and up to 2 guests from Word) at your choice of upcoming, complimentary lunch seminars that I will be hosting around the Bay Area …

Sure enough, it’s spam. And it was sent by a “senior account executive” at an ESP.
I’m pretty sure it was sent using harvested or epended data – they think my company name is “Word” rather than “Word to the Wise”, it was sent to my personal email address rather than my @wordtothewise.com one, and the postal address information I found they had on file was wildly wrong – “San Francisco, CA 94101” isn’t quite as obviously fake as “Beverly Hills, CA 90210”, but it’s close. They probably bought a list from Jigsaw or one of their competitors.
There’s no pretense of permission – I didn’t recognize them, didn’t give them my email address, and have no interest in their offerings. If they’re purchasing lists this bad, that’s probably true of most of the recipients – and those recipients are going to consider it spam too.
That’s not all. It probably violates CAN-SPAM. There’s the deceptive subject line and also several problems with the unsubscription link that probably make it non-compliant. Any ISP postmaster, spam filter maintainer or blacklist volunteer who looks at the mail is not going to be impressed. Heck, one blacklist maintainer – one of the sane, responsible, professional ones – I mentioned it to thought it would be adequate grounds for adding the sender to their blacklist.
Yet the ESP is reasonably mainstream. They’re a MAAWG member, and it turns out I know their deliverability / isp relations manager. I’m pretty sure they don’t let their customers get away with this sort of thing – but internal (or “friends and family”) accounts don’t get the same sort of oversight as customers, much the same as most other companies.
The sales guy sent it through the ESPs production systems – it’s from one of their smarthosts, DKIM signed by the ESP and uses the ESPs click-tracking domain in the body of the message. So the spam is going to damage their reputation – IP, domain and social.
I’m betting that they’ll be seeing higher complaint rates and some delivery problems over the next few days, due to one sales guy sending spam using their systems. Longer term, and potentially more seriously, people in the email industry are likely to remember them as spammers and be less prone to be helpful or cut them slack when they make a mistake.
It’s Wednesday. Do you know where your sales staff are?
 
 

Turn it all the way up to 11
Industry Jargon

Related Posts

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.

Read More

Appendleads is not unusual

I called out David Williams from appendleads.com yesterday for his spam. Sure he’s a spammer, his database is full of garbage information and his email violates CAN SPAM but he’s not that unusual in the realm of list sellers. He is very typical of the people I see offering lists for sale.
List sellers are the internet version of used car salesmen. Everyone knows they are slimy sales guys who will do anything to close the sale. They don’t have a real web presence, just visit appendleads.com and see what I mean.
And yet, people still buy lists from them! I have no doubt that my spammer friend has a nice little business selling email addresses. He sends out spam, he gets a few responses, makes a tidy profit and then sends out another spam, hooks a few more people and makes more money.
OK, so not all list sellers are like appendleads. Some of them go so far to build a website. But at the core they’re the same. They are selling data that isn’t clean, it’s not opt-in, it’s not been verified.
This is why so many of us harp on not buying lists. The sales guys talk a great game, but they aren’t selling what purchasers think they’re getting. They also don’t care. They have no incentive to clean up their data. They have no incentive to accurately represent what they’re selling. All of the risk is on the person that sends the email. Once they have their money, the buyer is on their own.
Can you ever successfully purchase a list? I’m sure some senders have. But that experience is closer to winning more than a thousand dollars in the lottery than an actual good business decision.

Read More

Delivery consulting: it's all about the credibility

A few months ago I found a great blog post written by an ER doctor about how to convince other doctors to come in and deal with a patient in the middle of the night. There are quite  few similarities between his advice and the advice I would give delivery experts, ISP relations folks and ESP representatives when dealing with ISPs and spam filtering companies.

Read More