But my purchased list is TARGETED!!!

listshoppingcartI hear this all the time. But, y’know what? It’s BS. Total BS.
In the last month, I’ve gotten “targeted” messages (that escaped my filters) from the following companies who purchased lists.

  1. A company offering Agile and Scrum classroom workshops… in Australia. (they know they’re spamming: they are hiding behind domain privacy)
  2. Laura Ashley offering me in store specials… in the UK. (their ESP doesn’t seem to respond to abuse complaints)
  3. A company offering hair growth products… shipped from the UK. (their ESP responded quite politely and are on top of things regarding my complaint)
  4. A company offering to let me invest in student housing… in the UK (they know they’re spamming: they have fake whois data)
  5. A company offering “secret bargains”, an affiliate of Amazon EU… advertising amazon.co.uk (this one is currently SBLed, but the spam hasn’t stopped, and has false whois records)

These are a few of the messages I’ve actually seen, the ones that escape my filters.
I’m sure the people who purchased the email addresses involved (and these messages are going to 3 different email addresses) paid good money for them. I’m sure they were told these were targeted messages.
The people who sold the addresses to them don’t know what they’re selling. I won’t go so far as to say they’re lying, but the companies that purchased the lists didn’t get what they thought they were.
These addresses are not only worthless to the buyers, in some cases they’re actively harmful.  ESPs involved have discovered their customers are violating their AUP just for mailing to me. In other cases, my address was on lists with dozens, if not hundreds, of Spamhaus spamtraps and that IP is now on the SBL.
This is just one small slice of one person’s mail stream. I actually don’t think my addresses get sold much more than the average persons, in fact I’m pretty sure I get less mail from purchased lists than other people. I know for a fact there are ESPs that block everything to my domain – much to my chagrin when one of their customers hires me to do an analysis and it take weeks to figure out why they can’t send me mail.
Much of my incoming sales in the last year have been mailers who, previously, were successfully buying lists and mailing them. Filters are getting better at blocking this mail, and a lot of businesses who are purchasing lists are discovering that their deliverability is in the toilet. The pattern is mirroring what happened to co-reg lists a few years ago. Filters got better and a lot of co-reg companies couldn’t stay in business because deliverability was so low. While I don’t think the market for purchased lists is going away – it’s too easy and too cheap to ever go away – I do think that it’s a challenge for a lot of companies.
With some customers we’ve worked out a transition plan, to get them away from reliance on purchased lists in the long term. They’re comfortable with the process and while it is a change, it’s on a scale they can financially manage. Other companies have looked at the finances and decided not to change and just struggle with the poor deliverability.
Overall, delivery to purchased lists is tough. And I don’t really see it getting any easier for buyers.
 

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Email verification services

Just yesterday a group of delivery folks were discussing email verification services over IRC. We were talking about the pros and cons, when we’d suggest using them, when we wouldn’t, which ones we’ve worked with and what our experiences have been. I’ve been contemplating writing up some of my thoughts about verification services but it’s a post I wanted to spend some time on to really address the good parts and the bad parts of verification services.
Today, Spamhaus beat me to the punch and posted a long article on how they view email verification services. (I know that some Spamhaus folks are part of that IRC channel, but I don’t think anyone was around for the discussion we had yesterday.)
It’s well worth a read for anyone who wants some insight into how email verification is viewed by Spamhaus. Their viewpoints are pretty consistent with what I’ve heard from various ISP representatives as well.
In terms of my own thoughts on verification services, I think it’s important to remember that the bulk of the verification services only verify that an address is deliverable. The services do not verify that the address belongs to the person who input it into a form. The services do not verify that an address matches a purchased profile. The services do not verify that the recipient wants email from the senders.
Some of the services claim they remove spamtraps, but their knowledge of spamtraps is limited. Yes, stick around this industry long enough and you’ll identify different spamtraps, and even spamtrap domains. I could probably rattle off a few dozen traps if pressed, but that’s not going to be enough to protect any sender from significant problems.
Some services can be used for real time verification, and that is a place where I think verification can be useful. But I also know there are a number of creative ways to do verification that also check things like permission and data validity.
From an ESP perspective, verification services remove bounces. This means that ESPs have less data to apply to compliance decisions. Bounce rate, particularly for new lists, tells the ESP a lot about the health of the mailing list. Without that, they are mostly relying on complaint data to determine if a customer is following the AUP.
Spamhaus talks about what practices verification services should adopt in order to be above board. They mention actions like clearly identifying their IPs and domains, not switching IPs to avoid blocks and not using dozens or hundreds of IPs. I fully support these recommendations.
Email verification services do provide some benefit to some senders. I can’t help feeling, though, that their main benefit is simply lowering bounce rates and not actually improving the quality of their customers’ signup processes.

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Posts and articles about the DMA spamming

The DMA kicks spam up a notch
The DMA: Spamming Job Services to a Purchased List
The DMA Spams A Bunch of Anti-spammers
The DMA sends e-mail that’s memorable, but not in a good way

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Buying lists costs more than just money

ShadyGuyWebsiteI’ve been talking to a lot of companies recently who are dealing with some major delivery challenges probably related to their practice of purchasing lists and then sending advertising to every address on the list. They assure me that their businesses would be non-viable if they didn’t purchase lists and it has to be that way.
Maybe that’s true, maybe it is more cost effective to purchase lists and send mail to them. I know, though, that their delivery is pretty bad. And that a lot of the addresses they buy never see their email. And that they risk losing their ESP, or they risk being SBLed, or they risk being blocked at Gmail, or they risk bulk foldering at Hotmail. There are a lot of risks to using purchased lists.
The reality is it’s only getting harder to mail to purchased lists and it’s getting more expensive to mail purchased lists. Paying for the list is a small part of the cost of using them.
Other costs incurred by companies using purchased lists include:
1) Having multiple ESPs. There are certainly legitimate reasons for companies to use different ESPs but there is a cost associated with it. Not only do they have to pay for duplicate services, but they spend a lot of employee time moving lists and recipients around to see who might have the better delivery today.
2) Multiple domains and brand new websites for every send. Landing pages are good marketing and are normal. But some ISPs track the IPs of the landing sites, and those IPs can get their own poor reputation. To get around it, senders using purchased lists often have to create new websites on new IPs for every send.
3) Complicated sending schedules. Sending schedules aren’t dictated by internal needs, they’re dictated by what ISP is blocking their IPs or domains (or even ESP) right now.
All of these costs are hidden, though. The only cost on the actual bottom line is the money they spend for the addresses themselves and that’s peanuts. Because, fundamentally, the folks selling addresses have no incentive to take any care in collecting or verifying the data. In fact, any verification they do only cuts into their profit, as buyers won’t actually pay for the verification and data hygiene and it also reduces the size of the lists they can sell.
And, no, data hygiene companies that look for traps and bounces and “bad addresses” don’t take a bad list and make it good. They just take a bad list and make it a little less bad. If the recipients don’t want the mail, all the hygiene in the world isn’t going to get that message into the inbox.
Outsourcing address collection to list selling companies is more expensive than it looks on paper. That doesn’t stop anyone from building a business around purchased lists, though.

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