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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July 2015: The Month in Email

Once again, we reviewed some of the ways brands are trying (or might try) to improve engagement with customers. LinkedIn, who frequently top lists of unwanted-but-legitimate email, announced that they’ll be sending less mail. Josh wrote about giving subscribers options for both the type and frequency of messages, and about setting expectations for new subscribers. In each case, it’s about respecting that customers really want to engage with brands in the email channel, but don’t want the permission they’ve granted to be abused. I also wrote a brief post following up on our June discussion on purchased lists, and as you’d predict, I continue to discourage companies from mailing to these recipients.

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May 2015: The Month in Email

Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures.
In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of the ESPs that have a clearly stated policy that they will not tolerate purchased lists. This should be valuable ammunition both for ESPs and for email program managers when they asked to use purchased lists. Let us know if we’re missing any ESPs by commenting directly on that post. We also shared an example of what we saw when we worked with a client using a list that had been collected by a third party.
In other best practices around addresses, we discussed all the problems that arise when people use what they think are fake addresses to fill out web forms, and gave a nod to a marketer trying an alternate contact method to let customers know their email is bouncing.
We also shared some of the things we advise our clients to do when they are setting up a mailing or optimizing an existing program. You might consider trying them before your own next send. In the “what not to do” category, we highlighted four things that spammers do that set them apart from legitimate senders.
In industry news, we talked about mergers, acquisitions and the resulting business changes: Verizon is buying AOL, Aurea is buying Lyris, Microsoft will converge Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail, and Sprint will no longer support clear.net and clearwire.net addresses.
Josh posted about Yahoo’s updated deliverability FAQ, which is interesting reading if you’re keeping up on deliverability and ESP best practices. He also wrote about a new development in the land of DMARC: BestGuessPass. Josh also wrote a really useful post about the differences between the Mail From and the Display From addresses, which is a handy reference if you ever need to explain it to someone.
And finally, I contributed a few “meta” posts this month that you might enjoy:

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