We got to slow down — and even take a brief vacation — in July, but we still managed to do a bit of blogging here and there, which I’ll recap below in case you missed anything. At the beginning of the month, I wrote about email address harvesting from LinkedIn. As you might imagine, I’m not a fan. A permissioned relationship on social media does not equate to permission to email...
There seems to have been an uptick in the number of folks harvesting addresses from their LinkedIn contacts and adding them to mailing lists. I’ve been seeing this in my own mailbox. I’m getting added to different lists and because I used a tagged address I know these folks are harvesting from LinkedIn. This behavior is really rude. Just because someone accepted your contact request...
I wrote a few days ago about permission and how it was the key to getting into the inbox. It’s another one of those “necessary but not sufficient” parts of delivery. There are, however, a lot of companies who are using email without the recipient permission. These companies often contact me to help them solve their delivery problems. Often these are new companies who are trying...
Dear Laura, I read your blog post about CAN SPAM earlier this week, and there’s one thing that confuses me. You never mention that harvesting addresses is a violation. I’ve seen many other people, including lawyers, assert that harvesting addresses is a violation of CAN SPAM. Why did you leave that out? Signed, Hopeful maker of musubi Dear Hopeful, The idea that harvesting is, in and...
I’m back from a fun and successful trip to the APSIS Email Marketing Evolved conference. Of course, this means I’m digging out my mailboxes and going through mail I’ve ignored for the past week. It’s amazing how the spam builds up when I’m not tending to it every day. One of the new spam streams is coming into the role account we published with our recent job posting...
This issue comes up repeatedly, as many people have read the CAN SPAM act and believe that CAN SPAM specifically prohibits sending mail to harvested address. This is not how I read the law. The FTC publishes a CAN SPAM Compliance Guide for Businesses that only mentions harvesting in the context of criminal penalties for violations. They list the following 7 main requirements of CAN SPAM. Don’t...
Some random UK email marketing company that I’ve never heard of harvested my address off of LinkedIn (yes, it’s my LinkedIn specific address) and is now spamming me advertising their cheap email marketing services. There were a lot of things about this particular mail that really annoyed me. The annoyance wasn’t just spam in a folder that shouldn’t have spam, it’s...
There are a number of places that will sell business leads from data they’ve compiled, crawled or crowd-sourced. How great is that? Anyone can buy a list of targeted business information to use to further their business goals! Awesome! Great! Step right up and get your lead here! But how accurate is that information really? One of the bigger companies, which allows for public searches, is...
Many years ago I was working at the UW-Madison. Madison is a great town, I loved it a lot. One of the good bits was this local satire paper called The Onion. This paper would show up around campus on Wednesdays. Our lab, like many university employees and students, looked forward to Wednesday and the new humor The Onion would bring to us. At the same time, I was internet friends with an employee...
There are a lot of people who assert that “no one” actually scrapes websites for email addresses any longer. My experience indicates this isn’t exactly true. We have a rotating set of email addresses on our contact page. Every day we push out a new email address. Every day we expire addresses that were pushed out 7 days ago. I can say, with 100% certainty, that there are people...
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