Earlier this week I received an email to a work address I retired 4 or 5 years ago. The from and subject lines alone were enough to make me laugh and decide I had to blog about this particular spammer.
From: TargetRight Marketing <>
Subject: Webinar: Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid When Renting B2B Email Lists
My initial thought was that they clearly couldn’t effectively rent a B2B email list and that is enough of a reason to not go to the webinar.
I mentioned the email online and one of my delivery friends mentioned wanting to see headers. This confused me, until I checked and realized that the mail came through that particular ESP. I sent a copy off to abuse@ and considered the matter done.
But there was even more fail than was immediately obvious. I did receive a helpful response from the ESP rep. It said:
Hi Laura,
You signed up for emails from the DMA Northern California like 100 years ago.
You unsubscribed from those emails like 100 years ago.
TopRight emailed this third party offer to that list, but from another account.
And they included people who had previously unsubscribed. Including you.
Let’s assume that wasn’t on purpose.
Also, the from address wasn’t DMA NC, nor was the body content, nor was there any reference whatsoever.
Oh. That list. See, when I first started out I attended one or two talks put on by the local DMA folks. At one or another of the sessions I paid my fee and was told to hand over a business card. Being a bit new at this I did. A few weeks later I started getting spam from the Northern California DMA. I know better now than to hand over a business card at something like this if I don’t want email.
So I unsubscribed from the DMA list, as the ESP said, like 100 years ago.
Some stunningly bad practices all around.
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Was there more to that email from the ESP? Because I’d really expect the next line to be something like “So, we’ve kicked them severely in the doink.”, which’d make a better punchline to this post.