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:

I wanted to follow up on a previous email I sent out a couple days ago.  At Company, we offer an affordable, innovative, and in-depth marketing service that will  keep you one step ahead of your competitors.  Would you or a member of your team be interested in setting aside some time to see how this works?

I’d missed the first mail, apparently it had been generic enough (only the domain name in the subject line, and an unfamiliar name in the From: address) that I marked it as spam. It looked like a bunch of the other spam I get, it came to an address different than that on the website.
I asked the sender where he got my email address, he told me that he got it from Zoom Info. I kinda feel sorry for the guy, actually. He’s clearly some new sales guy who is just trying to make sales for his company (founded in 2008 according to their website). The problem is, his company is selling themselves as marketing experts, yet their expertise is questionable. The mail I was sent did not comply with CAN SPAM. It did not have an opt-out, nor did it have a physical postal address. Any VP of Sales in the online marketing space should know better than this.
The ironic bit of this is that the founder of this particular company is someone I’ve worked with in the past. If the email had even the slightest bit of personalization, “Hi, Laura, you worked with Our CEO at CEO’s Former Company, and we’re working on a new project we’d like to show you,” then I would have at least opened a dialog with the company. Even saying, “hey, I read your blog and would like to talk to you about our new product and see how it might work for you,” would have gotten a less chilly reception from me. Buying a list and sending a generic “let me tell you about my business model” email? Not so much.
Yes, Mr. VP of Sales, you are acting just like a spammer. This is what spammers do.

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Jeremy Jaynes was a well known spammer who went under the name Gavin Stubberfield. He was pretty famous in anti-spammer circles for sending horse porn spam. In 2003 he was arrested under the Virginia state anti-spam statute. He was initially convicted but the conviction was overturned on appeal.
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But that's what spammers do!

A few weeks ago I was asked my opinion about a delivery situation. It seems that a sender wanted to mail to a purchased email list. They asked what I thought about getting fresh IP addresses and domains to use to send mail to the purchased list. “We know we’re going to get complaints, probably hit spamtraps and generally have problems with the first few sends of the list. We want to do this without harming our reputation. We figure if we move over to different domains and different IP addresses than we can send this mail and not suffer a reputation hit.”
Uh. Yeah. That’s what spammers do. They split off their mail into discrete sets so that they can spam with impunity and still have one or two ranges that have a good reputation and decent delivery. Some spammers have taken the discrete companies to extremes, and have a series of companies. They purchase a new list and send it through their companies one by one. At each step, they aggressively purge off bounces and complainers. Gradually, they move the list through their steps, resulting in a list that generates few complaints that they can send through their high reputation companies with few delivery problems.
Sure, legitimate mailers can do the same type of thing. But how legitimate can a sender be if they are using spammer tactics? And these are not mailers unwittingly doing something that spammers also do, these are mailers who are using spammer tactics for exactly the same reason spammers do it. They are trying to send mail people do not want, but send it in a way that does not negatively affect their bottom line.
Spammers hide and try to avoid their bad reputation. Legitimate mailers do not.

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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.

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