Spam works

I got a spam today advertising spamming services that ended with a tagline that can be paraphrased: We managed to spam you, let us spam others on your behalf!
OK, so what they actually said was:

We have proven that we can get our message through to you….Let us help get your message in front of your ideal audience.

The thing is, I’m not an ideal audience for his message. Really. Sending me spam to an address I’ve never actually used as an email address advertising your magic filter busting technique isn’t going to inspire me to use your service.
Plus, this guy is violating CAN SPAM all over the place.

  • Headers are forged.
  • There’s no physical postal address.
  • There’s no unsub link.
  • It’s coming from NoReply@.

There is a part of me that understands people respond to this kind of thing. Some desperate small business owner is going to get this email, think it’s actually targeted at him and call the number. He’s not necessarily going to realize this “targeted” email is totally un-targeted.
This small business person is also going to rely on the spammer for guidance on how to do things. And if the spammer does for the small business person what he did for himself, the small business person is going to be violating federal law. Of course, business people should understand what they’re doing and they shouldn’t buy from spam. But that seems to be expecting to much of people.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. H.L. Mencken. “Notes On Journalism” 9/19/1926

In fact, if no one ever bought from spam, then there wouldn’t be quite the spam problem there is today. Ten or so years ago I would confidently assert people didn’t buy from spam. Then the state of Arizona nailed C.P. Direct for selling fraudulent penis enlargement pills and confiscated between $30 and $60 million dollars worth of cash and property. That was the point where I realized people really were stupid or desperate enough to buy from spam.
This is why so many companies turned to filters as a solution. They realized that stopping people from buying from spam was a total non-starter. Spam works, no matter how many of us wish it didn’t. ISPs can only stop it from being delivered, not stop it from being sent.

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Spam isn't a best practice

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).

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Buying Lists

One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM.
As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me.
I can report nothing has changed. He’s still violating CAN SPAM. He’s still claiming I have no right to post, share, spindle, mutilate or fold his spam. Well, in the interest in something, I thought I’d share the whole post this time. Just to warn folks from attempting to purchase services from appendleads.com (nice website, by the way).

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