Appending in a nutshell

A few months ago a colleague sent me, and every other person on his overly large LinkedIn list, an email looking for some help hiring. It starts off with “Greetings LinkedI Connections” and ends with… an unsubscribe link.

P.S. If you don’t want to hear from me, here’s an unsubscribe link – that’s the easiest way. My LinkedIn network has gotten so ridiculously large that [unfortunately] I have to use an ESP to send messages like this out – which I do very infrequently – maybe a handful of times a year – I promise. 🙂

The part that really annoyed me was this person didn’t use my LinkedIn address. No, instead they found a different address for me and used that for their blast1 email. I pointed out to them that the address they mailed wasn’t my LinkedIn address. They replied they knew, that they’d mapped all their LinkedIn connections to corporate email addresses.
I asked them not to do that with my email address in the future, at which point they unfriended me on LinkedIn because it was easier.

This is the major problem with appending. I have an address associated with my LinkedIn account. It’s the address I have dedicated to handling requests from my LinkedIn network. But this person decided that it was better to use a different address to send me this email. Why? Dunno, you have to ask them. Probably because they thought, somehow, they’d get a better response if they ended up in my “primary” mailbox.
I suspect this person doesn’t like Gmail tabs either.
There are two major points I want to make with this story.
The first is that it’s a really bad idea to make assumptions about which email address to use for people, especially when they have given you an address to use. I do check my LinkedIn folder regularly but I do it on my time. My corporate address is for business. It’s for my clients, employees, and customers. Random requests for networking? I want those emails to go into my networking folder (and, yes, it really is named “networking”).
The second is, when someone says “please don’t do that again” don’t get all huffy about it. That only makes you look petulant and thin-skinned. In this case, the sender is an executive for a large player in the email space. Do you really think I’m going to recommend them to my clients? Fair or unfair, the interaction was unpleasant.
This is a very personal example of appending. A single person decided to find an address for me and specifically use that instead of the one I gave them. This was appending, but not in bulk. Nevertheless, it was someone else deciding they could override my decisions because they wanted to get in my inbox. It’s rude.
It’s no less rude when thousands of addresses are automatically appended to a list. In fact, that’s even more rude. Instead of just one annoyed person, there are thousands. Appending is a bad practice, whether it’s one or one million.

1: Yes, I called it a blast. It was a blast. Even the sender admits it’s a blast. They’re not doing anything other than importing hundreds of (collected, not opted-in) email addresses into an ESP and sending the same email to everyone of them, whether or not it’s relevant.

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TWSD: Run, hide and obfuscate

Spammers and spamming companies have elevated obfuscating their corporate identities to an artform. Some of the more dedicated, but just this side of legal, spammers set up 3 or 4 different front companies: one to sell advertising, one or more to actually send mail, one to get connectivity and one as a backup for when the first three fail. Because they use rotating domain names and IP addresses all hidden behind fake names or “privacy protection services”, the actual spammer can be impossible to track without court documents.
One example of this is Ken Magill’s ongoing series of reports about EmailAppenders.
Aug 5, 2008 Ouch: A List-Purchase Nighmare
Sept 9, 2008 Umm… About EmailAppenders’ NYC Office
Sept 15, 2008 E-mail Appending Plot Thickens
Nov 11, 2008 EmailAppenders Hawking Bogus List, Claims Publisher
Dec 23, 2008 Internet Retailer Sues EmailAppenders
Feb 1, 2009 EmailAppenders Update
Mar 10, 2009 Another Bogus E-mail List Claimed
April 14, 2009 EmailAppenders a Court No-Show, Says Internet Retailer
April 21, 2009 EmailAppenders Gone? New Firm Surfaces
May 5, 2009 EmailAppenders Back with New Web Site, New Name
Their actions, chronicled in his posts, are exactly what I see list providers, list brokers and “affiliate marketers” do every day. They hide, they lie, they cheat and they obfuscate. When someone finally decides to sue, they dissolve one company and start another. Every new article demonstrates what spammers do in order to stay one step ahead of their victims.
While Ken has chronicled one example of this, there are dozens of similar scammers. Many of them don’t have a persistent reporter documenting all the company changes, so normal due diligence searches fail to turn up any of the truth. Companies looking for affiliates or list sources often fall victim to scammers and spammers, and suffer delivery and reputation problems as a result.
Companies that insist on using list sellers, lead generation companies and affilates must protect themselves from these sorts of scammers. Due diligence can be a challenge, because of the many names, domains and businesses these companies hide behind. Those tasked with investigating affiliates, address sources or or mailing partners can use some of the same investigative techniques Ken did to identify potential problems.

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Mailbox preview and HTML content

I just received a slightly confusing email.
 
Inbox__86332_messages__19_unread_
 
The From address and the Subject line are from Sony, but the content looks like it’s from email analytics firm Litmus. What’s going on here?
Opening the mail it looks like a fairly generic “Oops, we lost a class-action lawsuit, have $2 worth of worthless internet points!” email from Sony; no mention of Litmus at all. My first thought is that Mail.app has managed to scramble it’s summary database and it’s pulling summaries from the wrong email, as I am on a Litmus mailing list or two, but nothing else looks off.
Digging around inside the source of the mail I do find a bunch of tracking gifs from emltrk.com, which is a Litmus domain so there is a Litmus connection there somewhere. Curious.
Finally, about two pages in to the HTML part of the mail I find this:

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You want to sell me a list?

Over the years, some of my clients have found it expedient to give me email addresses at their domains. These addresses forward mail addressed to laura@clientsite to my own mailbox. Generally these are so I can be added to internal mailing lists and have access to their internal tools.
It’s often amusing to see the spam that comes through to those addresses. Over the last few weeks I’ve received multiple spams advertising an email appending service.
Let the irony sink in. An email appending service is sending me an email at a client company offering the client company the opportunity to append email addresses. “See how accurate our appending is!”
How accurate can a service be if they can’t even target their own spam correctly?
In addition to the appalling targeting they’re also violating CAN SPAM (no physical postal address), their website is a collection of broken links and they don’t provide any company name or information in the email or on the website.
To top it all off, the mail says, “if you’re not the right person to act on this mail, please forward this to the right person.” Followed by a standard legal disclaimer that says, “The information contained in this e-mail message and any attachments is confidential information intended only for the use of individuals or entities named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail at the originating address.”
I wonder if blogging about the utter email incompetence about mail from David Williams, Business Development (phone number: 800-961-5127) violates the confidentiality clause?

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