Buying Lists

What not to do when buying lists

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 are the same email address. Of course, they’ve also managed to send to an untagged email address, too. I have no idea where they got that particular address; I’m sure I’ve never handed that address over to the DMA for any reason.
Saturday afternoon, I check one of the professional filtering / anti-spam mailing list. Some subscribers are asking for copies of spam from 97.107.23.191 to .194. They’d seen a lot of mail to non-existent email addresses from that range and were looking to see what was going on and who was sending such bad mail. Multiple people on the list popped up with examples of the DMA mail.
Sunday morning, I checked the discussions wherein I discovered the DMA was added to the SBL (SBL 202218, SBL 202217, SBL 202216). It seems not only did they hit over a hundred Spamhaus spamtraps, they spammed Steve Linford himself.

Before you build a list

I can’t add much more to Steve Denner’s article about building list size.

Poor delivery can't be fixed with technical perfection

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 filtering is score based, and the minor scores given to things like broken authentication and header issues and formatting issues can make the difference between an email that lands in the inbox and one that doesn’t get delivered.
I don’t think I’m alone in this approach, as many of my clients come to me for help with their technical settings. In some cases, though, fixing the technical problems doesn’t fix the delivery issues. No matter how much my clients tweak their settings and attempt to avoid spamfilters by avoiding FREE!! in the subject line, or changing the background, they still can’t get mail in the inbox.
Why not? Because they’re sending mail that the recipients don’t really want, for whatever reason. There are so many ways a sender can collect an email address without actually collecting consent to send mail to that recipient. Many of the “list building” strategies mentioned by a number of experts involve getting a fig leaf of permission from recipients without actually having the recipient agree to receive mail.
Is there really any difference in permission between purchasing a list of “qualified leads” and automatically adding anyone who makes a purchase at a website to marketing lists? From the recipient’s perspective they’re still getting mail they don’t want, and all the technical perfection in the world can’t overcome the negative reputation associated with spamming.
The secret to inbox delivery: don’t send mail that looks like spam. That includes not sending mail to people who have not expressly consented to receive mail.

Spammer loses in the court of public opinion

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. Simply complying with the law does not mean that spamming behaviour has to be tolerated by ISPs. What’s more, ISPs have a lot of power to stop him.
His recipients’ ISPs can stop him. Filtering companies can stop him. And his upstream can stop him. In fact, Mr. Luckman’s upstream is GoDaddy, a company that has an abuse desk that is one of the toughest on the Internet. They do not tolerate spamming at all and will disconnect customers that are spamming whether or not there is a SBL listing involved.
Sure, Mr. Luckman is complying, or says he’s complying, with CAN SPAM. But that doesn’t change the fact that he is violating his contract with GoDaddy. Given that admission, I am extremely surprised that the reporter focused so exclusively on Spamhaus’ role in this, without mentioning GoDaddy’s abuse enforcement or that Mr. Luckman has to comply with contracts he signed.
Most reputable marketers agree that sending mail to purchased email addresses is spam. Most recipients agree that mail they didn’t ask to receive is spam. Even the reporter agrees that Mr. Luckman is a spammer. Compliance with CAN SPAM doesn’t mean anyone is required to accept his mail, nor provide him with a connection to the rest of the internet.
This is a lesson Mr. Luckman is having problems learning. Instead of fixing his process so he isn’t sending spam, he contacts a reporter to plead his case in the court of public opinion. Sadly for him, most people hate spam and won’t defend a self admitted spammer against a blocking group. In fact, over 80% of the people who have voted in the “has Spamhaus gone too far” poll have said no. What’s your vote?

Tagged Email Addresses

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.

Appendleads is not unusual

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 guys who will do anything to close the sale. They don’t have a real web presence, just visit appendleads.com and see what I mean.
And yet, people still buy lists from them! I have no doubt that my spammer friend has a nice little business selling email addresses. He sends out spam, he gets a few responses, makes a tidy profit and then sends out another spam, hooks a few more people and makes more money.
OK, so not all list sellers are like appendleads. Some of them go so far to build a website. But at the core they’re the same. They are selling data that isn’t clean, it’s not opt-in, it’s not been verified.
This is why so many of us harp on not buying lists. The sales guys talk a great game, but they aren’t selling what purchasers think they’re getting. They also don’t care. They have no incentive to clean up their data. They have no incentive to accurately represent what they’re selling. All of the risk is on the person that sends the email. Once they have their money, the buyer is on their own.
Can you ever successfully purchase a list? I’m sure some senders have. But that experience is closer to winning more than a thousand dollars in the lottery than an actual good business decision.

Buying Lists

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 report nothing has changed. He’s still violating CAN SPAM. He’s still claiming I have no right to post, share, spindle, mutilate or fold his spam. Well, in the interest in something, I thought I’d share the whole post this time. Just to warn folks from attempting to purchase services from appendleads.com (nice website, by the way).

AARP, SureClick, Offerweb and Spam

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.

The legitimate email marketer

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 legitimate email marketers” are so bad that the phrase has entered the lexicon as a sign that the company is attempting to surf the gray area between commercial email and spam as close to the spam side of that territory as possible.
What do I mean by that? I mean that the address collection practices and the mailing processes used by self-proclaimed legitimate email marketers are sloppy. They don’t really care about individual recipients, they just care about the numbers. They buy addresses, they use affiliates, they dip whole limbs in the co-reg pool; all told their subscription practices are very sloppy. Because they didn’t scrape or harvest the email address, they feel justified in claiming the recipient asked for it and that they are legitimate.
They don’t really care that they’re mailing people who don’t want their mail and really never asked to receive it. What kinds of practices am I talking about?
Buying co-reg lists. “But the customer signed up, made a purchase, took an online quiz and the privacy policy says their address can be shared.” The recipient doesn’t care that they agreed to have their email address handed out to all and sundry, they don’t want that mail.
Arguing with subscribers. “But all those people who labeled my mail as spam actually subscribed!!!” Any time a mailer has to argue with a subscriber about the validity of the subscription, there is a problem with the subscription process. If the sender and the receiver disagree on whether there was really an opt-in, the senders are rarely given the benefit of the doubt.
Using affiliates to hide their involvement in spam. A number of companies use advertising agencies that outsource acquisition mailings that end up being sent by spammers. These acquisition mailings are sent by the same spammers sending enlargement spam. The advertiser gets all the benefits of spam without any of the consequences.
Knowing that their signup forms are abused but failing to stop the abuse. A few years back I was talking with a large political mailer. They were insisting they were legitimate email marketers but were finding a lot of mail blocked. I mentioned that they were a large target for people forging addresses in their signup form. I explained that mailing people who never asked for mail was probably the source of their delivery problems. They admitted they were probably mailing people who never signed up, but weren’t going to do anything about it as it was good for their bottom line to have so many subscribers.
Self described legitimate email marketers do the bare minimum possible to meet standards. They talk the talk to convince their customers they’re legitimate:

Permission is not a legal concept

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.

Delivery Blog Carnival – Selling, trading and renting email addresses

A couple weeks ago, I linked to a comment from a marketer mentioning that email addresses should be able to be traded around like snail mail addresses. I suggested this might be a good topic to hear from a lot of different people on.
Mickey posted List Rental is…. In that post he looked at how email is different from direct mail and how the attitudes are different as well.
The folks at Bronto got into the spirit of the blog carnival and Kristin, Kelly and Chris all contributed to a single post offering their perspectives on trading lists, intrusive marketing and delivery.
Al Iverson has two posts on buying lists. One is an older post talking about the delivery hassles and problems related to purchased lists from the perspective of a ESP delivery expert. Over on his SpamResource blog, he posts about the same issue from the perspective of a recipient who is tired of receiving spam.
I also posted on the issue, looking at how email is not snail mail and senders cannot be successful in email by applying the direct mail rules.
Thanks to everyone who submitted posts.

Another list purchase horror story

Last week Ken wrote about a marketer who is claiming he was ripped off by Target Point in a purchased list deal. To the purchaser’s credit he actually looked at the email addresses provided by Target Point, something many list purchasers don’t seem to do. This gave him some idea that the list was not opt-in.

TWSD: Run, hide and obfuscate

Spammers and spamming companies have elevated obfuscating their corporate identities to an artform. Some of the more dedicated, but just this side of legal, spammers set up 3 or 4 different front companies: one to sell advertising, one or more to actually send mail, one to get connectivity and one as a backup for when the first three fail. Because they use rotating domain names and IP addresses all hidden behind fake names or “privacy protection services”, the actual spammer can be impossible to track without court documents.
One example of this is Ken Magill’s ongoing series of reports about EmailAppenders.
Aug 5, 2008 Ouch: A List-Purchase Nighmare
Sept 9, 2008 Umm… About EmailAppenders’ NYC Office
Sept 15, 2008 E-mail Appending Plot Thickens
Nov 11, 2008 EmailAppenders Hawking Bogus List, Claims Publisher
Dec 23, 2008 Internet Retailer Sues EmailAppenders
Feb 1, 2009 EmailAppenders Update
Mar 10, 2009 Another Bogus E-mail List Claimed
April 14, 2009 EmailAppenders a Court No-Show, Says Internet Retailer
April 21, 2009 EmailAppenders Gone? New Firm Surfaces
May 5, 2009 EmailAppenders Back with New Web Site, New Name
Their actions, chronicled in his posts, are exactly what I see list providers, list brokers and “affiliate marketers” do every day. They hide, they lie, they cheat and they obfuscate. When someone finally decides to sue, they dissolve one company and start another. Every new article demonstrates what spammers do in order to stay one step ahead of their victims.
While Ken has chronicled one example of this, there are dozens of similar scammers. Many of them don’t have a persistent reporter documenting all the company changes, so normal due diligence searches fail to turn up any of the truth. Companies looking for affiliates or list sources often fall victim to scammers and spammers, and suffer delivery and reputation problems as a result.
Companies that insist on using list sellers, lead generation companies and affilates must protect themselves from these sorts of scammers. Due diligence can be a challenge, because of the many names, domains and businesses these companies hide behind. Those tasked with investigating affiliates, address sources or or mailing partners can use some of the same investigative techniques Ken did to identify potential problems.

Buying lists and other stupid marketing tricks

Back in November, I commented on Zoominfo and that they were selling senders very bad lists. At that time, Zoominfo did not have my current information. They have since rectified that problem and are now selling my information to people.
This morning, I received an email that said:

Fake privacy policies

I sign up at a lot of websites and liberally spray email addresses across the net. These signups are on behalf of one customer or another and each webform gets its own tagged and tracked email address. I always have a specific goal with each signup: getting a copy of a customer’s email, checking their signup process, auditing an affiliate on behalf of a customer or identifying where there might be a problem in a process. Because I have specific goals, I am pretty careful with these signups and usually uncheck every “share my email address” box I can find on the forms.
In every case the privacy policies of my clients and the things they tell me are explicit in that addresses will not be shared. It’s all opt-in, and email addresses are not shared without permission. Even in the cases where I am auditing affiliates, my clients assure me that if I follow this exact process my address will not be shared. Or so the affiliates have assured them.
Despite my care and the privacy policies on the websites, these addresses occasionally leak or are sold. This is actually very rare, and most of the websites I test never do anything with my address that I don’t expect. But in a couple cases these email addresses have ended up in the hands of some hard core spammers (hundreds of emails a day) and there was no useful tracking I could do. In other cases the volume has been lower, and I’ve watched the progression of my email addresses being bought and sold with morbid fascination.
Today an address I signed up at a website about a year ago got hit with multiple spams in a short time frame. All came from different IPs in the same /24. All had different domains with no websites. Whois showed all the domains were registered behind a privacy protection service. Interestingly, two of the domains used the same CAN SPAM address. The third had no CAN SPAM address at all. None of these addresses match the data I have on file related to the email signup.
It never ceases to amaze me how dishonest some address collection outfits. Their websites state clearly that addresses will not be bought an sold, and yet the addresses get lots of spam unrelated to the original signup. For those dishonest enough to do this they’ll never get caught unless recipients tags and tracks all their signups. Even worse, unless their partners test their signups or their mailing practices, the partners may end up unwittingly sending spam.

Two reasons not to buy a list

Ken Magill, celebrity, has two articles today that highlight the issue with buying lists from vendors. The first is yet another article about EmailAppenders selling bad data. In this case, it is not the buyers who are complaining. According to Ken EmailAppenders are sending out email advertising they can sell Internet Retailer’s list of 2008 conference attendees. Internet Retailer is disputing this and has sent EmailAppenders a cease and desist. EmailAppenders is currently dodging Ken’s attempts to get their side of the story.
The second is an article about Zoominfo, a new group in the list selling business. Zoominfo has long been harvesting information from other sites. Now, they are offering to sell their scraped and harvested list. Their only requirement is that the buyer sign an agreement to comply with CAN SPAM. And, yes, if someone is dumb enough to buy this harvested list, they should comply with CAN SPAM as sending mail to a harvested list triggers additional penalties if or when the FTC decides to go after the sender.
Not only are Zoominfo harvesting data, they are harvesting from ancient and obscure sources. They have no current information for me, but they managed to find an email address for a job I left in 1993. They have Steve listed as an employee of “postgreSQL INC” because they harvested the postgres mailing list archives. Mickey pointed out one of Zoominfo’s sources is http://free-personal-ads-wanted-sex-partner-near-hays-kansas.themasterwithin.ca/arch/4/. You do not even need to visit that site, just look at the URL!
Zoominfo’s VP and general manager claims they send emails to people regularly, offering them the chance to opt-out. First of all, I have never received one of these, have any of you? Secondly, some of the addresses are so old opt-outs are not relevant. Finally, unless they are monitoring their delivery, which I strongly doubt given their business model, anyone buying addresses from them is going to buy lots of dead addresses. And spamtraps. Lots of spamtraps.
I am sure that people who buy and sell lists regularly will tell me that these are outliers and that most companies who sell lists have higher data collection standards. My experience suggests that these are middle of the road list brokers. They are companies who are willing to sell anything with an @ sign in it and do not care about how sending to that data affects their customers.

Buying Data

Over on Spam Resource Al posted about data sellers and the ESP that supports them. As part of the post, he lists the pricing for email address lists.