Conversations with spammers

It’s amazing how many spammers try and fool deliverability into accepting a questionable list. All too often they fall back on a story. The basic points: a company you’ve never heard of collected millions of email addresses on a website hosted on a low end VPS.

I’ve never heard of your company. We’re just that much better at marketing. This list is guaranteed 100% opt in. Subscribers are desperate to hear from us. The mail is vital and important. We had some problems at our last ESP, but that’s just because they don’t understand our business model. And we had a brief problem with complaints. But they weren’t real complaints. Our competitors are signing up for the list and complaining to hurt out business. It’s not a list problem, it’s that we’re so dominant they have to subvert us. That’s just because we’re that much better at their jobs than anyone else.
You’re looking for deliverability help. Well, yeah, sometimes Gmail delivery is bad, but that’s simply because we won’t pay Google money for advertising. Google is so afraid of us they deliberately filter all this spectacularly wanted email into the bulk folder. They have problems with us as a business. Oh, and we might, sometimes, occasionally have a minor problem with Yahoo. But, again, it’s because we threaten them and they don’t want to have to compete on a level playing field.
If they’re a potential customer, I tell them about our services and offer a proposal. Once some company I’ve never heard of tells me their bad delivery is because global companies are afraid of them, there’s really nothing I can do. They’re unlikely to listen to me explain reality to them.
Sometimes, though, this conversation happens because I’m consulting for an ESP or an Agency. They’ve brought me in to discuss deliverability with a customer or vendor. In those cases, it’s my job to keep going.
Your site doesn’t actually have a signup form. That’s because we’re in the middle of an upgrade cycle and had some problems with the back end. [Alternative: We stopped collecting new email addresses because of their deliverability problems and removed the form.] Your site has a signup form, and I signed up, but never got any mail from you. We disconnected the signup form while we handle our deliverability problems. [Alternative: That shouldn’t happen. We can forward you some messages instead.] I have received spam advertising your company. We had a rogue affiliate that we discovered was spamming and we cut them off.
No, this is direct from your IP space. Oh, well, you must have opted in and forgotten about it. [Alternative: We had a rogue sales guy, but we fired him for spamming.] Your company has only been in business for 3 years, this is an address I haven’t used since the ’90s. Oh, we probably bought a company that you opted into and so have permission that way.
That’s not really permission. Of course it is!
OK…. How can I help you. We want you to call Google / Yahoo / Hotmail and tell them we’re really a legitimate company that’s sending content and we shouldn’t be in the bulk folder.
What have you changed? Nothing! Why would we change anything? We’re great marketers. We have all these plans but need to get back to the inbox before we can implement them.
Um… there’s no filter setting for “laura says they’re a good sender.” They’re going to look for new sending patterns so let’s change a few things. Well, we recently removed 2/3 of our database, but it made no difference so we don’t know what else you think we can do.
Let’s talk about your technical setup.

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Random thoughts on spammers

I recently received a 419 spam that had a message at the top of the email.

Yup, a 419 spammer is trying to convince me there are millions of dollars waiting for me, but he won’t pay his software vendor 29.99 to comply with a license.
This is only the most recent in a long line of examples of spammers being cheap and attempting to steal services.
Back when I was working abuse almost every ISP had a story about a spammer who refused to pay their bill. Or spammers who were so high maintenance they cost the company money.
The company I worked for had a spammer that was on our system for far too long. Eventually they were cut off for non-payment and their hardware was confiscated. Still, the spammer came in and managed to remove the hardware before the building guards were alerted. It was disappointing, but at least they weren’t spamming off our network any longer.
Even now, ESPs share stories of customers who come in, spam and never pay their bill. Works for the spammer, they can get a few weeks of spamming in without having to pay for the service. They spew their stuff and leave a giant mess for the ESP to clean up. Next week, they’re on to the next ESP.
The real problem with this is that with enough ESPs and enough sends you can clean a list. This list can then be sold, or moved to a credible ESP without any of the tell tale signs of a purchased list. It’s so common it even has a name: waterfalling. It’s profitable, though, and there are enough small ESPs out there with little compliance experience that it can work.
I regularly get questions from folks who’ve worked themselves into a hole about swapping IPs or domains in order to get out of the hole. My answer is always the same. Changing identity might work in the short term, but it won’t work longer term. I also tell them that spammers have been trying to avoid filters for a lot longer than they have. Spammers are good at it, and still get caught in filters. Better to spend time trying to fix the underlying problem – typically users aren’t engaged with your mail – then trying to obfuscate who is sending the message to avoid filters.
Focus on sending good email that users want, rather than trying to avoid filters. That’s the key to getting into the inbox.

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