Brand name spam

I’ve been getting a lot more spam advertising name brand companies. Places like FTD Flowers, Seattle Coffee Direct, Wal-Mart, Jet Blue, Gevalia and VistaPrint seem to all be working with spammers. In some cases, I am getting the same email to different email addresses from different domains and different IP addresses.
I am sure, if asked, all the advertised companies would say they have no knowledge of spamming by their vendors. I’m sure they would say that their vendors tell them I opted in to the email and must have just forgotten. I am sure that this isn’t really spam.
Except it really is spam. Real companies with real brands do use the services of spammers. When caught they loudly protest their innocence and talk about rogue affiliates. In the best cases they will “fire” the affiliate and then look the other way when the affiliate signs back up.
Spam is sending mail to people who never requested it. Hiring someone to do it for you doesn’t mean you aren’t a spammer. With the economy tanking and companies trying to maximize their bottom line, more and more name brands seem to be jumping on the spam bandwagon. It is not an unexpected development, but it will mean more aggressive spam filtering and more difficult email delivery for everyone.

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Negative branding, part 2

Last week I commented on negative branding in email. One of the comments on that post was an advertisement for a company called WrapMail. In the course of attempting to determine if this was spam or a real comment, I checked out their website. While the comment itself may not be spam, and it may not be providing services to spammers, the entire business model strikes me as a delivery nightmare.
Briefly, once you sign up with this company, you set your mail client to use their SMTP server. As all of your mail goes through their server is it “wrapped” with a HTML template of your choosing. All of your email is now branded with that template, allowing you to formally advertise your business even during the course of standard business communications.
There are multiple ways this can negatively impact a specific brand.

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The unexpected email

In almost every discussion of “how to stop spam” someone will come up with the idea that if a recipient only allowed known people to send them email then the spam problem would be solved. There are lots of problems with this type of solution, but one of the biggest is that it ignores that sometimes the unexpected email is wanted. Typically, these unexpected but wanted emails is from an old friend or contact. But sometimes, the unexpected email can actually look like unsolicited bulk email and yet be wanted.
I actually received one of those emails today. The folks at http://schmap.com found my flickr stream and sent me email asking me for permission to use a couple of my photos in their London city guide. Completely unexpected, but very welcome email.
Sometimes, in the struggle to keep email useful and to keep spam out of the inbox, we forget how useful and wanted that unexpected email can be.

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Email and the Obama Campaign

Late in the summer there were people talking about the spam coming from Senator Obama’s presidential campaign. At that time, most of the discussion was focused on the open subscription form on their website and that there were some individuals who had been fraudulently signed up and were now receiving email from the campaign.
Last week, the Senator’s campaign again became a topic of discussion among some anti-spam groups. The maintainer of one of the more respected public blocklists and members of his family received mail from Senator Obama’s presidential campaign at their personal addresses. Because the mail was unsolicited and met the qualifications for listing, the sending IP addresses were listed on the blocklist. In response, the campaign’s ESP started moving the Senator’s mail to other IP addresses, resulting in those IPs also being listed on the blocklist as well.
I talked with the blocklist maintainer and I believe that his address, and those of his family members, were added to the Senator’s mailing list as the result of an email append. All of them are registered Democrats and they all live in a battleground state.
This may have made for good campaign strategy, not being an expert I cannot comment on that. It is, however, very poor email marketing strategy.
First, the campaign decided to appropriate permission to send email. There is not ever permission associated with an email append. Just because you have a name and a street address does not mean that you have permission to send email. In very, very limited circumstances, an opt-in append (click here to continue receiving email) may be acceptable. However, that is not how appending is normally done.
There is no pretense of permission to send email. Just because someone is registered to a particular party does not mean they want to receive email from that party.
Second, when the campaign started seeing delivery problems they started sending off different IP addresses. Moving IPs around is out and out spammer behavior, no questions asked.
Now, I know this is a very hotly contested election and I know that some people believe that any method of getting the word out is good. I also expect that there may have been some positive reaction from recipients. The overall reaction, based on the IPs changing, may not have been so positive.
Do I really believe that Senator Obama is a evil and willful spammer? No, not really. But that does not change the fact that the Obama campaign seems to be sending email without the permission of the recipient and seem to be attempting to evade blocks by moving IP addresses.
From a marketing perspective, the campaign may be using email effectively and doing everything right. But from an email delivery perspective, they are getting many, many of the basics wrong and are looking like spammers in the process.
Other news and blogs that talk about spam from the Obama campaign:

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