No one harvests email addresses any more

There are a lot of people who assert that “no one” actually scrapes websites for email addresses any longer. My experience indicates this isn’t exactly true.
We have a rotating set of email addresses on our contact page. Every day we push out a new email address. Every day we expire addresses that were pushed out 7 days ago.
I can say, with 100% certainty, that there are people harvesting addresses off websites. The ads are reasonably “targeted.” Most of them are offering increased traffic, or the ability to monetize the website. Some are offering work from home.
I suppose you could call these targeted mails. After all, what website owner doesn’t want more traffic? Who wouldn’t want to make hundreds of dollars a day from the comfort of their own couch? What website owner doesn’t want their site submitted to 2700 different search engines?
Targeted spam is still spam. And having a rotating, expiring contact address has kept the amount of spam coming into our contact address low enough that the contact address is actually useable. 10 spams a month (for a 7 day old email address) is much more manageable than 1000 emails a month (for a 4 year old email address).

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Are you sure? Part 2

There was a bit of discussion about yesterday’s blog post over on my G+ circles. One person was telling me that “did you forget you opted-in?” was a perfectly valid question. He also commented he’s had the same address for 20 years and that he does, sometimes forget he opted in to mail years ago.
As an anti-spammer with the idea that it’s all about consent, I can see his point. Anti-spammers, for years, have chanted the mantra: “it’s about consent, not content.” Which is a short, pithy way to say they don’t care what you send people, as long as the recipients themselves have asked for it.
This is the perfect bumper sticker policy. As with most bumper sticker policies, though, it’s too short to deal with the messy realities.
I’m not knocking consent. Consent is great. Every bulk mailer should only be sending mail to people who have asked or agreed to receive that mail.
But if your focus is on delivery and getting mail to the recipient’s inbox and getting the recipient to react to that mail then you can’t just fall back on consent. You have to send them mail that they expect. You have to send them mail that they like. You have to send them mail they will open, read and interact with.
If your permission based recipients are saying they forgot that they signed up for mail, that is a sign that the sender’s program is futile. These are people who, at one point or another, actually asked to receive mail from a sender, and then the mail they receive is so unremarkable that they totally forget about the sender.
Maybe that’s another reason the question “are you sure you didn’t forget you opted in” from clients bothers me so much. If I signed up and forgot that points to problems in your program, mostly that it’s totally unremarkable and your subscribers can forget.

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First spam to Epsilon leaked address

This morning I received the first two spams to the address of mine that was compromised during the Epsilon compromise back in April. Actually, I received two of them. One was the “standard” Adobe phish email. The other was similar but referenced Limewire instead of Adobe.

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Another kind of email breach

In all the recent discussions of email address thievery I’ve not seen anyone mention stealing addresses by abusing the legal system. And, yet, there’s at least one ambulance chasing lawyer that’s using email addresses that were never given to him by the recipients. Even worse, when asked about it he said that the courts told him he could use the email address and that we recipients had no recourse.
I’m not sure the spammer is necessarily wrong, but it’s a frustrating situation for both the recipient and the company that had their address list stolen.
A few years ago, law firm of Bursor and Fisher filed a host of class action lawsuits against various wireless carriers, including AT&T. At one point during the AT&T lawsuit the judge ruled that AT&T turn over their customer list, including email addresses, to Bursor and Fisher. Bursor and Fisher were then to send notices to all the AT&T subscribers notifying them of the suit.
This is not unreasonable. Contacting consumers by email to notify them of legal action makes a certain amount of sense.
But then Bursor and Fisher took it a step further. They looked at all these valid email addresses and decided they could use this for their own purposes. They started mailing advertisements to the AT&T wireless list.

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