On Friday I mentioned spam coming from a BarkBox affiliate programme. The original email is here. It’s not terribly exciting, it’s rather typical spam of the sort sent by professional spammers. It’s validly DKIM and SPF authenticated, and DMARC-aligned. It includes invisible white-on-white padding text so that it doesn’t look like image-only spam to naive filters (using...
If I see BarkBox I think Spam. That’s because, despite their marketing team effort, facebook and banner ad budget, the main place I see them advertised is via spam in my mailbox. It’s not even good spam. There’s quite a lot of it. Most of it looks much the same, other than the spammer randomizing colours. This one looks better than the black on cyan version, or any of the other...
An article popped up on LinkedIn about a recent 2nd court of appeals ruling that I thought was interesting. Back in 2011, the FTC and the state of Connecticut filed suit against a company called LeanSpa and their affiliate marketer called LeadClick. LeanSpa sold various diet products through negative option marketing. LeadClick was the affiliate company they used to help drive traffic and...
What are affiliate mailers? Affiliate mailers collect email addresses and then rent access to those addresses out to 3rd parties. There are a wide range of vendors that fall into the affiliate category. Some vendors compile lists through co-registration, others compile lists themselves through website opt-ins and some affiliate vendors fulfill mailing requests by hiring affiliates. There are, of...
Mickey has a great story of what happened when he gave a lead gen company his email address. Over 200 emails in 2 weeks from companies that seem unrelated to the signup company. It’s this behavior by PayDay senders that causes their mail to be filtered and has caused many, many ESPs just to prohibit that kind of mail on their systems. It’s very much the ugly underbelly of email...
One of the things we all “know” is that if spammers get their hands on spamtrap addresses then they’ll stop sending mail to those addresses. This is true for a lot of spammers, but sadly it’s not true for all. I don’t think it’s any secret that I consult for all types of mailers, from those who just need a little tune up to those who want me to help them avoid...
Spammers have already figured out how to abuse the new twitter video service (VINE) to make money. I wish I could say I was surprised, but spammers (and scammers) are some of the earliest adopters of technology out there. They adopt it and try to extract as much money as possible before the property owners can catch up and implement anti-abuse technology. Too few companies actually build products...
A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls. In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging...
The Verge has a long article about Internet Marketing and how much fraud is perpetrated by people who label themselves Internet Marketers. It was interesting, but I didn’t think it was necessarily relevant to email marketers until I saw this quote from Roberto Anguizola at the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. “savvy internet fraudsters use fake information, they use a host of shell...
Boris Mizhen is once again on the wrong side of legal action. This time it’s not as simple as Microsoft suing him for creating hundreds of thousands of accounts to try and game the spam scoring system. Instead, he seems to have run afoul of the FTC. This case isn’t obviously about email, but the FTC alleges that companies under the “control or influence” of Boris set up a...
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