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.

[…] 788 of the addresses contained some combination or abbreviation of the words “customer service,” or “customer care.”
Also, 193 of the addresses were “accounting@,” 455 of the addresses were “admin@,” 84 of the addresses were “administration@” or “administrator@,” 223 of the addresses were “careers@,” 108 of the addresses were “comment@” or “comments@,” 297 of the addresses were “contact@,” 160 of the addresses were “service@,” 1,448 of the addresses were “sales@,” and a whopping 7,684 addresses were “info@.”

Many clients come to me wondering why they are having such difficulty mailing their ‘guaranteed double opt in list’ that they purchased through a vendor like Target Point. One quick look at the list shows addresses similar to the above. Role accounts are almost never found on opt-in lists (with some exceptions) and finding lots of “info@” or “administrator@” address is a good sign that there are problems with the seller.
The most important thing to remember is that just removing the obvious role accounts from the purchased list is not going to magically make the list OK. There are going to be problems with the other addresses on the list, too. Mailing them will cause you problems.
Yet another example of why mailing purchased lists is bad. Not only do they cause delivery problems, but sometimes you don’t even get what you pay for.

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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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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.

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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:

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