The cycle goes on

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.
 
 
 

Related Posts

Outreach or spam?

This showed up in my mailbox earlier today:
Pluckyou
The tweet in question
pluckyou2
From Crunchbase: “Pluck is an email prospecting tool that gives you the email addresses of the people tweeting about subjects related to your business.”
Prospecting: another name for spamming. Look, I know that you want to sell you’re newest, greatest product to the world. But just because I tweet something with a # that you think is relevant to your product doesn’t mean that I want to get your spam. I also know it’s hard to get attention and find prospects; I’m a small business owner, too and I need to market my own services. But spamming isn’t a good idea. Ever.
There’s been a significant increase in this kind of spam “to help your business” lately. It’s a rare day I don’t get something from some company I’ve never heard of trying to sell me their newest product. It might be something if they tried a contact or two and then went away. But they’ll send mail for weeks or months without getting an answer. Look, silence IS an answer and it means you need to go away and leave your prospects alone.
Unfortunately, there are services out there that sell a product that let you “automatically follow up” with your prospects. Pluck up there uses one of them, as that’s who’s handling all the links in the message. In fact, if you go to the bare domain (qcml.io) they talk a good anti-spam game. “Die, spammers, die.” I reported the message to them. I’m not expecting them to actually do anything, and I’m not expecting a response.
It’s just spam under another name. There’s no pretense that it’s anything else. Even if it’s sent in a way that makes it look like a real person typed the message, like QuickMail offers. “All emails will come straight out of your personal inbox as though you typed them yourself.” As if you typed them yourself.
The worst part is there’s no real way to stop the mail. I can’t unsubscribe. The companies selling the software don’t provide any guidance to their customers about what the law requires. Take the message from Pluck that started the post. It violates CAN SPAM in multiple ways. Moreover, the address they used is not publicly associated with my twitter handle, which means they’re doing some harvesting somewhere. That means treble penalties under CAN SPAM.
I could reply and ask them to stop mailing me. I’ve done that a couple times with a message that says, “Please don’t email me any more.” I’ve got to tell you, some people get really mad when you ask them not to email you. Some just say yes, but others are really offended that you asked them to stop and get abusive. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t ask any more because of that one person who decides to harass, threaten and scream at me. Sure, it’s maybe 1 in 5, but I don’t have the time or energy to figure out who is going to be receptive and who isn’t. I don’t have time for that. No one has time for that.
I’m expecting that filters are going to catch up eventually and these types of mail will be easier to filter out. Until then, though, small business owners like myself are stuck in a place where we have to deal with spam distracting us from our business. At least I get blog content out of it.
 
 
 

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I can even opt out of most of these messages, they don’t offer that ability.

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