The cycle goes on

laura
Best practices
June 15, 2017

Monday I published a blog post about the ongoing B2B spam and how annoying it is. I get so many of these they’re becoming an actual problem. 3, 4, 5 a day. And then there’s the ongoing “drip” messages at 4, 6, 8, 12 days. It is getting out of control. It’s spam. It’s annoying. And most of it’s breaking the law.
But, I can also use it as blog (and twitter!) fodder.

I get spam…

I get a lot of this mail. But typically I delete, block or filter and move on. I don’t send a lot of spam complaints because they take time and I have better things to do. I usually only send complaints to ESPs where I know folks; mostly as a favor to them. There aren’t a lot of FBLs that cover B2B mail, so the individual complaints are useful. But, complaining takes time, not much admittedly, but sometimes it’s more time than I can (or want to) spare.
Yesterday was slower than normal, though. I wanted to follow the Senate hearings, so was just catching up on stuff while watching CSPAN. I checked out the AUP at the ESP. It looked pretty good. Even better, it wasn’t the standard boilerplate borrowed from a site that borrowed it from a different site that borrowed it from somewhere else. When it comes to AUPs, it’s turtles all the way down.

Anyway, I sent a message to their abuse address. It was one of my normal notices, nothing exciting or earth shattering. I assume anyone reading the abuse mailbox can ID their customers, they don’t need pages of whois or IP lookups. Just the facts, ma’am. My messages have full headers, a sentence or two about the message and then I click send and dispatch it into the ether. My job is done.

And they reply…

Today I was pleasantly surprised to get a reply back from them. Apparently they’re blog readers (HI!). They talked to their customer and discovered the source of the email address was bad, seems the address was ‘misrepresented’ as opt-in to their customer. I asked if they’d tell me who sold the address. They kindly told me where my address was purchased.

And I am amused…

The company selling the address was one that approached me for delivery help earlier this year. Their database has a problem, they said. They want to really clean it up, they said. I sent a proposal, then they disappeared. Happens. But, now I know they’re representing that database as valid. Even though they know it’s a train wreck (my words, not theirs).
Monday’s post was prompted by different vendor in the space contacting me for delivery help. Seems it’s really hard to consistently spam B2B targets. I’m pleased that the commercial filters and outsourced mailbox providers are doing such a good job.

And it doesn’t end…

And, as I’m writing this post, I got ANOTHER one of these. This one is even better. It’s from someone named Vitaliy Katsenelson. The subject line is a real winner: Hello from your LinkedIn BFF. Except it’s not sent to an address LinkedIn has for me. So, right then, I know they’re lying. But, because I’m blogging about this and I’m in a frivolous mood, I decide to look him up on LinkedIn.
Guess how long we’ve been connected on LinkedIn? How long a relationship would you expect “BFF” to describe? A week? A month? A year?
Whatever you guess, you’re probably wrong. We’re not connected on LinkedIn. He’s my BFF and we’re not even connected.
OK, so that’s not a true sign of BFFs. I mean, there are folks I’m quite good friends with that I’m not connected to on LinkedIn. Just not realized it, or haven’t taken the last step. Fair enough. Guess how many connections we have in common?
One. We have ONE whole connection in common. And I’m not even quite sure who that connection is – I generally accept all LinkedIn connections, so there are a lot of folks I don’t know on my list. Not exactly someone I’d call my BFF.

And now one of them calls…

I have a boilerplate I was sending for a while. In it I point out they’re violating CAN SPAM (because 99 times out of 100, they are). I point out they should really have that looked at and that we sell services for CAN SPAM compliance. Usually, that actually makes them go away, which is the real point. But one of the spammers called me while I was writing this. Really.
He assured me that the hundreds of messages he sent out every day were indeed written by him. All of these hundreds of messages are one-to-one. I don’t believe him. I told him that. He said of course they were. I said he was buying addresses and dropping them into his automation software. He denied everything.
Just FYI: these “one to one” messages are coming direct from Salesforce.
I asked where he got my address. He tells me LinkedIn. AGAIN with the LINKEDIN! No. No it’s not LinkedIn. That’s not the address LinkedIn has for me. Sorry dude. Then he backtracks and says he gets addresses from lots of places. Duh. I told you that above. You’re buying addresses and I know it and you know it. And you’re violating the law when you do it.
Just FYI: I have different emails in different places to make it easier for me to respond appropriately to messages.
He really just wanted me to know, though, that he worked very hard to find my name. These are one-to-one messages because he just knows that his services would help my day to day workload. It’s really hard for him to send hundreds of personalized messages a day and he doesn’t use software and it’s all about the recipient.
Just FYI: my LinkedIn profile makes it very clear we’re not a candidate for their services.
And… now he’s asking to be connected to me on LinkedIn. “Because he likes my passion.” Yeah. Maybe not.

So what’s your point…

I don’t really have one, I’m feeling punchy.
Well, OK, maybe I do. Look, I am a small business person. I AM your target market. B2B drip campaigns are annoying. They’re spam. Just because you upload a list of addresses and click “send” individually doesn’t make them one-to-one mail. They’re still bulk. Filters are evolving to catch and block or spam folder this kind of mail. I expect there’s probably 12 or 18 months left until the filters really catch up.
Right now most of the software sends mail through the users’ Gmail or Office365 account. Those ISPs have limits to the amount of mail any one account can send per day. They will change these limits to deal with outbound abuse.
Even more important, filters continue to evolve. They’re always improving. These messages get through now, but the more that are sent, the more the filters have to work with. Small business owners are moving their domains to Google Apps or Office365. These filters know it’s not one email, or 10 emails, but it’s hundreds or thousands of emails every day. Business users now have TIS buttons. Google and Microsoft measure engagement on business emails. They’ll adapt quickly. These “one-on-one” messages will end up in the bulk folder and rot away.
Spammers will, of course, find a new way to annoy recipients. And the filters will adapt. So it goes.

Reaching targets, the wrong way

I’ve been increasingly annoyed by these drip automation campaigns. You know the ones I mean. Senders use some software to find some flimsy pretext to send a mail. Then there emails drop every few days. Sometimes this cycle goes on for months. Most of these messages violate CAN SPAM. It’s annoying. It’s illegal. It is spam.
I can even opt out of most of these messages, they don’t offer that ability.

Parasites hurt email marketing

As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really.
“I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.”
“We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you?”
“I have scheduled a meeting tomorrow so I can tell you about our product that will solve all your technical issues and is also a floor wax.”
None of these emails are anything more than spam. They’re fake personalized. There’s no permission. On a good day they’ll have an opt out link. On a normal day they might include an actual name.
These are messages coming to an email address I’ve spent years trying to protect from getting onto mailing lists. I don’t do fishbowls, I’m careful about who I give my card to, I never use it to sign up for anything. And, still, that has all been for naught.
I don’t really blame the senders, I mean I do, they’re the ones that bought my address and then invested in business automation software that sends me regular emails trying to get me to give them a phone number. Or a contact for “the right person at your business to talk to about this great offer that will change your business.”
The real blame lies with the people who pretend that B2B spam is somehow not spam. Who have pivoted their businesses from selling consumer lists to business lists because permission doesn’t matter when it comes to businesses. The real blame lies with companies who sell “marketing automation software” that plugs into their Google Apps account and hijacks their reputation to get to the inbox. The real blame lies with list cleansing companies who sell list buyers a cleansing service that only hides the evidence of spamming.
There are so many parasites in the email space. They take time, energy and resources from large and small businesses, offering them services that seem good, but really are worthless.
The biologically interesting thing about parasites, though, is that they do better if they don’t overwhelm the host system. They have to stay small. They have to stay hidden. They have to not cause too much harm, otherwise the host system will fight back.
Email fights back too. Parasites will find it harder and harder to get mail delivered in any volume as the host system adapts to them. Already if I look in my junk folder, my filters are correctly flagging these messages as spam. And my filters see a very small portion of mail. Filtering companies and the business email hosting systems have a much broader view and much better defenses.
These emails annoy me, but I know that they are a short term problem. As more and more businesses move to hosted services, like Google Apps and Office365 the permission rules are going to apply to business addresses as well as consumer addresses. The parasites selling products and services to small business owners can’t overwhelm email. The defenses will step in first.

What do you think about these hot button issues?

It’s been one of those weeks where blogging is a challenge. Not because I don’t have much to say, but because I don’t have much constructive to say. Rants can be entertaining, even to write. But they’re not very helpful in terms of what do we need to change and how do we move forward.
A few different things I read or saw brought out the rants this week. Some of these are issues I don’t have answers to, and some of them are issues where I just disagree with folks, but have nothing more useful to say than, “You’re wrong.” I don’t even always have an answer to why they’re wrong, they’re just wrong.
I thought today I’d bring up the issues that made me so ranty and list the two different points of views about them and see what readers think about them. (Those of you who follow me on Facebook probably know which ones my positions are, but I’m going to try and be neutral about my specific positions.)