You've got to be kidding me

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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Appendleads is not unusual

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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.

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TWSD: keep spamming even when they say they'll stop

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.
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