Yes, spam is actually still a problem

I hear a lot of people claim that spam isn’t really a problem any more. That filters are so good that the average user doesn’t see a lot of spam and if they do get “legitimate” mail that they can just opt out.
These are great sounding arguments, the problem is that those arguments aren’t always true.
There is an address I stopped using for commercial mail around 1997 and all mail around 2002. It still gets hundreds of emails a month.
Those hundreds of emails a month are despite the fact that the address is behind commercial spam filters. It’s been on “flamers lists.” It’s on the “do not mail” list that came with the “Millions CD.”
In addition, I am very open with clients (and their affiliates) that this is a “spam trap” address. I’ve handed it out to dozens and dozens of companies over the years describing it as my spam trap address.
In November 2013, I unsubscribed from every single email received at that account – at least those that had unsubscribe links.
What does the mail volume look like now?
MonthlySpamCounts_Smallpng
If anything unsubscribing made the volume problems worse. In the best case it lowered the volume briefly to something approaching 10 emails a day.
There are currently over 500 messages I’ve received so far in August. These are messages advertising companies like Laura Ashley, MetLife, Military.com, Quibids, Walk In Tubs, Sainsbury’s, Bloomburg, Fidelity, Oral B, Lasix Vision Institute, Virgin Broadband, ClickNLoan, Timeshares, iMotors, Walmart, oil changes, Experian, Credit monitoring, Life insurance, ADT, CHW Home Warranty, Health Plans of America, Bosley Hair Solutions, Jillian Michaels Online, restaurant coupons, credit cards, SBA loans, and that’s before we get to the Garcinia cambogia, herbal viagra and clearly fraudulent stuff.
This account, that hasn’t been subscribed to anything in more than 10 years is getting hundreds of unasked for emails a month, even with the benefit of commercial filters. It appears to be being sold or traded in multiple countries (Laura Ashley, Virgin Broadband and Sainsbury’s are all in the UK). I don’t want this mail. I have tried to stop getting this mail.
Yes, spam is still a problem.

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End of quarter spam

There has been a plethora of big brand companies doing stupid stuff with marketing recently. I can only figure it’s end of quarter and everyone is looking to pump up their numbers as fast as possible.
I talked about Millenium hotels sending me with an utterly irrelevant ad earlier this week.
@Yahoomail direct message spammed all their twitter followers with an ad for something related to the new Yahoo mail product.
Anyone watching my twitter feed yesterday probably noticed me complaining about spam from Dell.
All of these things are just examples of sloppy marketing. In Dell’s case it’s even worse because they sent me multiple copies of the spam to different addresses. Two copies of the same “SHOP NOW!” email to different addresses, one of which has never been given to Dell.
Mail to the first address is unquestionably spam and I did send in a complaint to Dell’s ESP. That address is never used to sign up for anything. I did try clicking on the “update your subscription” link in the footer and Dell’s website helpfully told me that address was not on their mailing lists. Looks like Dell bought a list.
The second address is one that was involved with the purchase of software from Dell last July. This is the first non-transactional mail sent to that address. I can’t necessarily call the email spam as I did give it to Dell during the course of a transaction. However, Dell could have done a lot better in managing our “relationship” than they did.
Dell collected my email address as part of a transaction in July 2010. They did not start sending marketing mail to this address until May 2011. While Dell is a major brand and most people would recognize the name and may be a little less inclined to hit “this is spam” waiting 10 months between a purchase and regular mailings is a bad idea.  People who don’t use tagged addresses may forget they gave the sender an email address and automatically send in a spam complaint.
Sitting on an address for 10 months means Dell really should have done a welcome series, or even just a single welcome email, to ease the transition from no mail to regular mail. But, no, they just send me an email advertising their sales.
We’ve been Dell customers for quite a while, and all of our purchases have been enterprise grade hardware or software to run on those servers. We’ve never purchased anything remotely like office computers. But the sales flyer was for desktops, printers and monitors. Dell knows what I purchased from there, so why are they sending me ads for things I’ve never bought?
We have our own Dell sales rep, and my only involvement in the transaction is source of payment. Adding me to a product list really feels like spam.
Then there was the email itself.  The “update your subscription” link was broken and told me I wasn’t subscribed to their list. I mentioned it to Steve and he pointed out that particular link had been broken “forever.” How long has it been since anyone inside of Dell has checked that their footer links work?
What is Dell up to? Who knows. But they unarguably are sending mail to addresses that never opted in. And even if you consider an email giving during a purchase process their handling of that particular address was appalling and in violation of almost every good practice out there.
 

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TWSD: My lunch is not spam

My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and ISPs.
Since the poster took the time to link to my blog, I thought I’d take the time to look in detail at his post and talk about how likely it is to work.

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Spam from mainstream companies

Yesterday I wrote about spam I received advertising AARP and used it as an example of a mainstream group supporting spammers by hiring them (or hiring them through proxies) to send mail on their behalf.
My statement appears to have upset someone, though. There is one comment on the post, coming from an IP address allocated to the AARP.

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