No, I'm really not Christine

Got this to one of my accounts recently.

Congratulations and welcome to emailinform.

Dear Christine
Welcome to emailinform – the program that brings you some of the best offers, discounts and competitions around. All offers have been chosen specifically for you and give you something useful, entertaining or just downright cheaper than usual.

When registering with our partner Intermedia you kindly gave your permission to receive information and special offers from selected third parties.

emailinform and our partners take your permission seriously. Should you wish to unsubscribe from our service, you can do so at anytime using the link at the bottom of this email or via the link on any future emails from us.

Here’s just a sample of some of the great offers we have!

We hope you enjoy this service and look forward to bringing you more great offers soon.
Kind regards,
Jane Stevens
The emailinform Team

I’ve tried, in the past, to tell companies that Christine gives my email address to that I’m not her, she’s using my address and to please stop mailing me. They mostly ignore me, or tell me that I must have opted in and forgotten. Really?!?!?!
My name isn’t Christine. I don’t live in the UK. And whatever you think I am interested in? You’re Wrong.
And that’s the marketing fail here. The companies collecting this address are putting a lot of time an effort into collecting demographic and interest data from Christine. But despite all that, they do nothing to verify that the email address is correct. As a result all their time and money is wasted. I’m never going to purchase whatever it is their selling.
What’s more, that’s an address I have had for 20 years and gets a lot of spam. I stopped using it regularly more than 10 years ago. I often share mail to that address with ESPs looking for evidence their customers are spamming. I share mail to that address with blocklists that may need extra evidence for a listing. I share mail to that address with my clients who have affiliate programs causing delivery problems.
The stupidest bit? The absolute dumbest thing about this whole thing? I have given this address as a spamtrap address to the affiliates. Those affiliates knowingly are mailing spamtrap addresses and don’t care. All these affiliate companies are ones that my clients have told me are “the best and cleanest in the business.” If this is the behaviour of the best, I’m afraid to ask how incompetent the worst are.
 
 

Related Posts

TWSD: lie about the source of address

A few months ago I got email from Staff of Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont, to an addresses scraped off one of my websites. At the bottom it says:

Read More

Harvesting and forging email addresses

For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam.
Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website less than a month and I’m already getting lots of spam to it. Most of it is business related spam, but there’s a couple things that make me think that someone has been signing that address up to mailing lists.
One is the confirmation email I received from Yelp. I don’t actually believe Yelp harvested my address and tried to create me an email account. I was happy when I got the first mail from Yelp. It said “click here to confirm your account.” Yay! Yelp is actually using confirmations so I just have to ignore the mail and that will all go away.
At least I was happy about it, until I started getting Yelp newsletters to that address.
Yelp gets half a star for attempting to do COI, but loses half for sending newsletters to people who didn’t confirm their account.
I really didn’t believe that people would grab a clearly tagged address off the blog and subscribe it to mailing lists or networking sites. I simply didn’t believe this happened anymore. I know forge subscribing used to be common, but it does appear that someone forge signed me up for a Yelp account. Clearly there are more dumb idiots out there than I thought.
Of course, it’s not just malicious people signing the address up to lists. There are also spammers harvesting directly off the website.
I did expect that there would be some harvesting going on and that I would get spam to the address. I am very surprised at the volume and type of spam, though. I’m getting a lot of chinese language spam, a lot of “join our business organization” spam and mail claiming I subscribed to receive their offers.
Surprisingly, much of the spam to this address violates CAN SPAM in some way shape or form. And I can prove harvesting, which would net treble damages if I had the time or inclination to sue.
It’s been an interesting experience, putting an unfiltered address on the website. Unfortunately, I am at risk of losing your questions because of the amount of spam coming in. I don’t think I’ve missed any, yet, but losing real mail is always a risk when an address gets a lot of spam – whether or not the recipient runs filters.
I’m still pondering solutions, but for now the questions address will remain as it is.

Read More