It's Wednesday – do you know where your sales staff are?

I received an email yesterday with the subject “Please confirm your lunch reservation”. It didn’t look like a typical spam subject line, but wasn’t from anywhere I recognized.
I take a look.

I’ve reserved a seat for you (and up to 2 guests from Word) at your choice of upcoming, complimentary lunch seminars that I will be hosting around the Bay Area …

Sure enough, it’s spam. And it was sent by a “senior account executive” at an ESP.
I’m pretty sure it was sent using harvested or epended data – they think my company name is “Word” rather than “Word to the Wise”, it was sent to my personal email address rather than my @wordtothewise.com one, and the postal address information I found they had on file was wildly wrong – “San Francisco, CA 94101” isn’t quite as obviously fake as “Beverly Hills, CA 90210”, but it’s close. They probably bought a list from Jigsaw or one of their competitors.
There’s no pretense of permission – I didn’t recognize them, didn’t give them my email address, and have no interest in their offerings. If they’re purchasing lists this bad, that’s probably true of most of the recipients – and those recipients are going to consider it spam too.
That’s not all. It probably violates CAN-SPAM. There’s the deceptive subject line and also several problems with the unsubscription link that probably make it non-compliant. Any ISP postmaster, spam filter maintainer or blacklist volunteer who looks at the mail is not going to be impressed. Heck, one blacklist maintainer – one of the sane, responsible, professional ones – I mentioned it to thought it would be adequate grounds for adding the sender to their blacklist.
Yet the ESP is reasonably mainstream. They’re a MAAWG member, and it turns out I know their deliverability / isp relations manager. I’m pretty sure they don’t let their customers get away with this sort of thing – but internal (or “friends and family”) accounts don’t get the same sort of oversight as customers, much the same as most other companies.
The sales guy sent it through the ESPs production systems – it’s from one of their smarthosts, DKIM signed by the ESP and uses the ESPs click-tracking domain in the body of the message. So the spam is going to damage their reputation – IP, domain and social.
I’m betting that they’ll be seeing higher complaint rates and some delivery problems over the next few days, due to one sales guy sending spam using their systems. Longer term, and potentially more seriously, people in the email industry are likely to remember them as spammers and be less prone to be helpful or cut them slack when they make a mistake.
It’s Wednesday. Do you know where your sales staff are?
 
 

Related Posts

The dark side of email marketing

Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything.
Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct contact (that I know of) with any of the players on this end of things I have zero doubt that if they called me they would tell me that they were legitimate email marketers.
In one case, a members of a spam gang kidnapped the teenage daughter of someone investigating their activities. The gang held her for more than 5 years in horrific conditions. Yesterday Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error” posted on Boing Boing that his friend got his daughter back. It is a heartbreaking story and incredibly sobering.
In another case, the Russian police arrested a man who ran spammit.com, a clearinghouse for viagra sellers to find spammers to send their mail. Reports say that mail volumes dropped by a fifth after the site was taken offline.
There is real evil in the email marketing industry. Sure, they’re spammers and we can all stand up and say they’re not legitimate. But, this is what the ISPs and Spamhaus and law enforcement are dealing with on a regular basis.

Read More

Spam isn't a best practice

I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices.
Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have customers sending spam. In either case, I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices and what we all mean when we talk about best practices. In conversing with various people it’s clear that the term doesn’t mean what the speakers think it means.
For me, best practice means sending mail in a way that create happy and engaged recipients. There are a lot of details wrapped up in there, but all implementation choices stem from the answer to the question “what will make our customers happy.” But a lot of marketers, email and otherwise, don’t focus on what makes their recipients or targets happy.
In fact, for many people I talk to when they say “best practice” what they really mean is “send as much mail as recipients will tolerate.” This isn’t that surprising, the advertising and marketing industries survive by pushing things as far as the target will tolerate (emphasis added).

Read More

Suing spammers

I’m off to MAAWG next week and seem to have had barely enough time to breathe lately, much less blog. I have a half written post, but it’s taking a little more research to put together. That can wait until I get the chance to do the research.
Instead I thought I’d talk about the North Coast Journal article “The Rise and Fall of a Spam Crusader.” It’s quite an interesting article and looks into the personal and business sacrifices that people make in order to chase down spammers.
In my experience a lot of the serial litigators have very poor practices around data collection and analysis. They don’t collect evidence, they just collect email and then make assertions and assumptions. This not every effective when having to convince a judge that you are right.
The article actually does nothing to change this impression. The cases ASIS won are the cases where the defendants didn’t respond. That also means that ASIS couldn’t collect.
I do disagree with Mr. Singleton, the lawyer, where he says CAN SPAM is dead. In many cases I’ve seen there aren’t clear CAN SPAM violations. So if he’s trying to sue these spammers under CAN SPAM his cause of action is wrong. Secondly, the article goes on to talk about the broader implications.

Read More