Spam works

I got a spam today advertising spamming services that ended with a tagline that can be paraphrased: We managed to spam you, let us spam others on your behalf!
OK, so what they actually said was:

We have proven that we can get our message through to you….Let us help get your message in front of your ideal audience.

The thing is, I’m not an ideal audience for his message. Really. Sending me spam to an address I’ve never actually used as an email address advertising your magic filter busting technique isn’t going to inspire me to use your service.
Plus, this guy is violating CAN SPAM all over the place.

  • Headers are forged.
  • There’s no physical postal address.
  • There’s no unsub link.
  • It’s coming from NoReply@.

There is a part of me that understands people respond to this kind of thing. Some desperate small business owner is going to get this email, think it’s actually targeted at him and call the number. He’s not necessarily going to realize this “targeted” email is totally un-targeted.
This small business person is also going to rely on the spammer for guidance on how to do things. And if the spammer does for the small business person what he did for himself, the small business person is going to be violating federal law. Of course, business people should understand what they’re doing and they shouldn’t buy from spam. But that seems to be expecting to much of people.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. H.L. Mencken. “Notes On Journalism” 9/19/1926

In fact, if no one ever bought from spam, then there wouldn’t be quite the spam problem there is today. Ten or so years ago I would confidently assert people didn’t buy from spam. Then the state of Arizona nailed C.P. Direct for selling fraudulent penis enlargement pills and confiscated between $30 and $60 million dollars worth of cash and property. That was the point where I realized people really were stupid or desperate enough to buy from spam.
This is why so many companies turned to filters as a solution. They realized that stopping people from buying from spam was a total non-starter. Spam works, no matter how many of us wish it didn’t. ISPs can only stop it from being delivered, not stop it from being sent.

Related Posts

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.

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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).

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Light blogging for a while

Sorry for the lack of substantive posts, things seem to have gone completely out of control and I’m not finding a lot of extra cycles to sit down and blog. I’ll try and get some stuff up this week, but I’m also getting ready for MAAWG and the sessions I’m a part of there.
There was an interesting post by Romer over on his personal blog. If you don’t know, Romer helps maintain one of the commercial mail filters. He recently got spammed by one of his vendors and talked about how this is probably not the best idea. Al adds his own take on companies assuming permission. I’ve talked about taking permission in the past but haven’t touched on things like “spamming the guy who runs the filter.”
You’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, about how many people who run filters for large organizations get spammed regularly. You wouldn’t be surprised to find out that those people do factor in their own personal spam load when adjusting their organizational filters.

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