Spamming for deliverability

This morning I woke up to a job offer. I hear a number of other email deliverability folks received the same job offer.

I am writing to you from [Company].  We are one of the oldest and best reputed partners for Salesforce.  We have succeeded because we only hire the best, most experienced developers.  We have a need for an excellent expert in deliverability.  We have been watching you for years via social media and we feel that you are proven and match this profile. If you are satisfied where you are, then we apologize for bothering you, however if you welcome the challenge of being stretched by working with the best and brightest in the world, we want to talk to you.

Most of our developers work remotely from their home.  We have complete centralized support for you, you will be expected to concentrate on helping customers solve their deliverability problems and you will be working with the largest corporations and with growing small and medium size businesses. This is a fulltime position with full benefits. 

We are interested in you, and we would like to discuss the position with you so that we may proceed.  Please just reply to this email and let me know your preferred method of communication.  We have multiple open positions, so please share this invite with others you feel are qualified.

I know a lot more about this particular position than is conveyed in the email. See, last week I spoke to Company. They were looking for some help with deliverability. Not, of course, the kind of deliverability I do they have all the expertise they need in high level strategy. Instead, they wanted someone to run Salesforce reports and … something? It was never that clear what they were expecting to do with the Salesforce reports as they didn’t need advice or assistance.

The email itself links to a website and a blog site. If I click on the blog site gives me a default CPanel “this website is horribly misconfigured” error page. If I go to their website and click “blog” it shows me a blog that’s not been updated since Dreamforce 2017.

A screenshot of the 404 page linked to in the spam I received.

I share this so that my deliverability colleagues are aware that this company is scraping and sending out mail without even checking basics like “did we contact this person already?”

I’m also a little concerned about the offer of full time remote work. Given how this position was pitched to me last week and how it’s being pitched in the email, I’m really unsure this is a legitimate offer. It also looks like it is, potentially, a bad cut and paste of a job offering a different position. Of all the things I’ve heard deliverability folks called “developer” is not on the list.

Just be careful out there.

Null sender address
Should you publish a DMARC policy statement?

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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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Compliance vs. Deliverability

Most people I know handling delivery issues for senders have some version of delivery or deliverability in their job title. But as I talk to them about what they do on a daily basis, their role is as much policy enforcement and compliance as it is delivery. Sure, what they’re telling customers and clients is how to improve delivery, but that is often in the context of making customers comply with relevant terms and conditions.
Some delivery folks also work the abuse desk, handling complaints and FBLs and actually putting blocks on customer sends.
I think the compliance part of the delivery job description that is often overlooked and severely downplayed. No one likes to be the bad guy. None of us like handling the angry customer on the phone who has had their vital email marketing program shut down by their vendor. None of us like the internal political battles to convince management to adopt stricter customer policies. All of these things, however, are vital to delivery.
Despite the lack of emphasis on compliance and enforcement they are a vital and critical part of the deliverabilty equation.

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McCain Campaign Spamming

As I mentioned in my post on spam from the Obama campaign, there have been reports of spam coming from the McCain campaign. However, the McCain campaign does not seem to be sending the volume of mail that the Obama campaign is, and so they are not as visible.
A recent post over at Denialism Blog shows that the McCain campaign has some of the same problems as the Obama campaign. Chris talks about the unsubscribe options he is presented when trying to stop the spam he is receiving. He suggests the campaign adds another option:

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