A new twist on confirmation

I got multiple copies of a request to “confirm my email address” recently. What’s interesting is the text surrounding the confirmation request.

Hello,
I have a list of potential customers in your area. The list includes several ways for you to contact them.
I would like to send you a sample of this list to the address I have on file: spamtrap@example.com.
Can you call me today at 1 (800) 676-2011 Ext 619 to confirm your email?
Thanks,
Travis Smith
Prospect Profile Specialist
1 (800) 676-2011 Ext 619

This message came to multiple spamtraps of mine. But I thought it was interesting that they’re actually trying to confirm addresses, even if the text surrounding it is a bit of a lie. None of the addresses the message was sent to is associated with any sort of commercial site.
Wonder how many confirmations Travis is getting? And if he’s actually sending “lists of customer addresses” to them, or if he’s actually just taking the confirmed addresses and adding them to the lists he is selling.

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Don't leave that money sitting there

The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts.
I’m probably the first to admit that confirmed opt-in isn’t the solution to all your delivery problems. There are situations where it’s a good idea, there are times when it’s not. There are situations where you absolutely need that extra step involved and there are times when that extra step is just superfluous.
But whether a sender uses confirmed opt in or not they must do something to confirm that the email address actually belongs to their customer. It’s so easy to have data errors in email addresses that there needs to be some sort of error correction process involved.
Senders that don’t do this are leaving money on the table. They’re not taking that extra step to make sure the data they were given is correct. They don’t make any effort to draw a direct line between the email address entered into their web form or given to them at the register or used for a receipt, and their actual customer.
It does happen, it happens enough to make the non-tech press. Consumerist has multiple articles a month on some email address holder that can’t get a giant company to stop mailing them information about someone else’s account.
Just this week, the New Yorker published an article about a long abandoned gmail address that received over 4000 “legitimate” commercial and transactional emails.

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Confirmation is too hard…

One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part.
I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm.
A couple years ago I was troubleshooting a problem. One of my client’s customer was seeing a huge percentage of 550 errors and I was tasked with finding out what they were doing. The first step was identifying the source of the email addresses. Turns out the customer was a Facebook app developer and all the addresses (so he told me) were from users who had installed his apps on Facebook. I did my own tests and couldn’t install any applications without confirming my email address.
Every Facebook user that has installed an application has clicked on an email to confirm they can receive email at the address they supplied Facebook. There are over 1 billion users on Facebook.
Clicking a link isn’t too hard for people who want your content. I hear naysayers who talk about “too hard” and “too much drop off” but what they’re really saying is “what I’m doing isn’t compelling enough for users to go find the confirmation email.”
This isn’t to say everyone who has a high drop off of confirmations is sending poor content. There are some senders that have a lot of fake, poor or otherwise fraudulent addresses entered into their forms. In many cases this is the driving factor for them using COI: to stop people from using their email to harass third parties. Using COI in these cases is a matter of self protection. If they didn’t use COI, they’d have a lot of complaints, traps and delivery problems.
The next time you hear confirmation is too hard, remember that over 1 billion people, including grandparents and the technologically challenged, managed to click that link to confirm their Facebook account. Sure, they wanted what Facebook was offering, but that just tells us that if they want it bad enough they’ll figure out how to confirm.
HT: Spamresource

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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.

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