Saturday morning I check my mail and notice multiple emails from the DMA. Yes, I got three copies of an email from the US Direct Marketing Association with the subject line Kick It Up A Notch With The DMA Career Center. It seems the DMA are buying addresses from various companies. Because I use tagged email addresses, this means their naive de-duping doesn’t realize that laura-x and laura-y...
I can’t add much more to Steve Denner’s article about building list size.
There are a number of different things delivery experts can do help senders improve their own delivery. Yes, I said it: senders are responsible for their delivery. ESPs, delivery consultants and deliverability experts can’t fix delivery for senders, they can only advise. In my own work with clients, I usually start with making sure all the technical issues are correct. As almost all spam...
Columnist Mike Cassidy of the SJ Mercury News dedicates his column today to explaining how horribly a spammer named Michael Luckman is being treated by Spamhaus. The gist of the story is that Mr. Luckman thinks that because it is legal to purchase lists and send mail that there is nothing anyone can do to stop him from doing so. Unfortunately for Mr. Luckman, this isn’t actually true...
Sept 17, 2019: Shutting down comments on this post because we cannot help you recover any email account and I am concerned about the number of people who are providing PII (including phone numbers, credit card numbers!!! and email addresses) in the comments. A tagged email address is any email address that provides some additional information to the recipient when they receive email sent to that...
I called out David Williams from appendleads.com yesterday for his spam. Sure he’s a spammer, his database is full of garbage information and his email violates CAN SPAM but he’s not that unusual in the realm of list sellers. He is very typical of the people I see offering lists for sale. List sellers are the internet version of used car salesmen. Everyone knows they are slimy sales...
One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM. As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me. I can...
On Tuesday Laura wrote about receiving spam sent on behalf of the AARP. The point she was discussing was mostly just how incompetent the spammer was, and how badly they’d mangled the spam such that it was hardly legible. One of AARPs interactive advertising managers posted in response denying that it was anything to do with the AARP. This isn’t from AARP…this is a SPAM that’s been going...
I cannot tell you how many times over the last 10 years I’ve been talking to someone with a problem and had them tell me “but I’m a legitimate email marketer.” Most of them have at least one serious problem, from upstreams that are ready to terminate them for spamming through widespread blocking. In fact, the practices of most companies who proclaim “we’re...
One trap I see companies fall into when looking at opt-in and permission is they seem to think that permission is a blanket thing. They believe permission can be bought and sold by the companies that collected email addresses. Legally, they may be correct. But in practice senders cannot decide that they can sell the permission of their recipients to another entity. As Al said today, you cannot...
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