Spot the CAN SPAM violations

laura
Industry
October 5, 2011

I received this piece of unsolicited email today, to an address harvested off a website. How many CAN SPAM violations can you count?

From: "Ashley Anderson"
To: <MUNGE>
Subject: Do You Want Access to NEW Customers?
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2011 13:49:42 -0700
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Hello,
Does you company need access to fresh databases that can be used
for E-mail Marketing, Direct Mail & Telemarketing?
We have access to 200 Million Consumers & 45 Million
Businesses.=09
Some of our most popular lists are:
> U.S. Realtors - 1,281,916 Full Records=09
> U.S. Lawyers - 269,787 Full Records=09
> U.S. Financial Planners - 265,425 Full Records=09
> U.S. Businesses - 4.8 Million Full Records=09
> U.S. Manufacturers - 1,057,119 Full Records=09
> U.S. Homeowners - 1,326,620 Full Records=09
> U.S. Physicians - 741,809 Full Records=09
> Worldwide Investors - 8,562,140 Emails Only=09
*Much More Available Upon Request=2E
Call us to get a FREE quote!
Thank You,
Ashley Anderson
Data Specialist
Business Networking Services
1 (800) 841-5070

I’m counting at 4 violations, plus aggravated damages because the address was harvested.
How many violations can you find?
Would you trust this company to sell you actual opt-in addresses?

CAN SPAM Plaintiff ordered to pay 800K in lawyer fees

Asis Internet service has been ordered to pay over $800,000 in lawyer fees to Optin Global. Venkat has details. This is the same company that was recently awarded $2.5M judgment in a different case.

What Happens Next…

or Why All Of This Is Meaningless:
Guest post by Huey Callison
The analysis of the AARP spam was nice, but looking at the Mainsleaze Spammer Playbook, I can make a few educated guesses at what happens next: absolutely nothing of consequence.
AARP, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say “It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous lead-gen contractor”. They probably send a strongly-worded letter to SureClick that says “Don’t do that again”.
SureClick, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say ‘It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous affiliate”. They probably send a strongly-worded letter to OfferWeb that says “Don’t do that again”.
OfferWeb, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say ‘It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous affiliate”. And maybe they DO fire ‘Andrew Talbot’, but that’s not any kind of victory, because he probably already has accounts with OTHER lead-gen outfits, which might even include those who also have AARP as
a client, or a client-of-a-client.
So the best-case result of this analysis being made public is that two strongly-worded letters get sent, the URLs in the spam and the trail of redirects change slightly, but the spam continues at the same volume and with the same results, and AARP continues to benefit from the millions of spams sent on their behalf.
I’m not a lawyer, but I was under the impression that CAN-SPAM imposed liability on the organization that was ultimately responsible for the spam being sent, but until the FTC pursues action against someone like this, or Gevalia, corporations and organizations will continue to get away with supporting, and benefiting from, millions and millions of spams.
As JD pointed out in a comment to a previous post: sorry, AARP, but none of us are going to be able to retire any time soon.

Defining spam

This is a post I’ve put off for a while as the definition of spam is a sticky subject. There are online fora where the definition of spam has been debated for more than 10 years, and if there isn’t a working definition after all that time, it’s unlikely there will ever be a definition the participants can agree on.
This came up again recently because one of the comments on my “Reputation is not permission” post took me to task for daring to call the mail “spam.” I’m going to assert here that the mail was unsolicited bulk email. I did not ask for it and I know at least 4 other people that received it.
The commenter, and a few marketers, argue that if the mail is sent without any forgery and the mail contains an opt-out link then it is not spam. It is a definition I have only seen folks who want to send unsolicited bulk email use, however. What they are really arguing is their mail isn’t spam because they provide a valid return address and a way to opt-out. Few people actually agree with this definition.
Here are 10 of the many definitions of spam that I’ve seen.

Spot the CAN SPAM violations

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CAN SPAM Plaintiff ordered to pay 800K in lawyer fees

What Happens Next…

Defining spam