Spammers, eh?

SpamBoxI’m back from a fun and successful trip to the APSIS Email Marketing Evolved conference. Of course, this means I’m digging out my mailboxes and going through mail I’ve ignored for the past week. It’s amazing how the spam builds up when I’m not tending to it every day.

One of the new spam streams is coming into the role account we published with our recent job posting. These are relevant newsletters in that they are designed for employers and are advertising services to help us find candidates. My favorite is probably the one that has this footer.

This email message is confidential, intended only for the named recipient(s) above, and may contain information that is privileged, attorney work product, or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you have received this message in error, or are not the named recipient(s), please immediately notify the sender at contact@employmentcrossing.com and delete this email message from your computer. Thank you.
Office: 20 S Altadena Dr, Pasadena, CA 91107
You are receiving this email from us because you signed up with us and/or our group career companies from careers@
If you no longer wish to receive this mail in future : Unsubscribe Here

The named recipient is the oh-so-specific “Employer.” Yeah, no. I would say this message was received in error, as the sender has erred by spamming me.
I also found a message from a website called brewster.com. They sent me a message with the subject line “Laura Atkins’s popularity score is in top 1%.” When I open the message, they inform me:

Your popularity rank is based on who has you as a contact. See how you compare to Sam Melamed and others.
Click below to check out your rank and see the 2 emails and 2 phone numbers people have for you.

I am, apparently, more popular than some Google Groups, who are also receiving notices that they are popular on Brewster.
Apparently this is some sort of PII collecting machine that harvests data out of their users’ address books and then collects it. I did some poking over on their website and they promise to maintain the privacy of their actual users, but make no mention of privacy for non-users. Their twitter feed is full of requests to send mail to support@brewster.com in order to “resolve” the issues.
On a marketing level both of these may be reasonable tactics to collect data and find targets. I’m sure, in fact, these companies would both tell me they’re legitimate marketers and are doing nothing wrong. But both companies are spamming, full stop. They’re scraping addresses from various sources and sending large amounts of mail. One of them is sending from a private VPS hosting company. The other has lost at least one ESP due to their poor sending practices.
These are only two of the examples of legitimate spam I received over the last week. Sure, there was a lot of russian porn spam, too. But there was a depressing amount of spam from real sources. At least with the responsible ESPs I know the issue will be appropriately dealt with.

Two factor authentication
Privacy and being online

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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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If you want to spam, don't be stupid

Some random UK email marketing company that I’ve never heard of harvested my address off of LinkedIn (yes, it’s my LinkedIn specific address) and is now spamming me advertising their cheap email marketing services. There were a lot of things about this particular mail that really annoyed me. The annoyance wasn’t just spam in a folder that shouldn’t have spam, it’s that the spam itself was badly done.
The thing is, they could have done this in a way that didn’t annoy me enough to blog about them being spammers. A teeny, tiny amount of effort and an ounce of empathy for their recipients and I wouldn’t have anything to blog about today.
If you want to spam, don’t be stupid. How can you avoid being stupid?
1) Send only one email and make it clear in the message this is a one time (or limited time) email. Don’t just randomly harvest addresses off a website, like Submission Technology did today, and add all those addresses to your marketing list. Spam is an interruption and an annoyance. And if spammers had any sense they’d limit the amount of time they spent annoying and interrupting recipients.
2) Target your email correctly and don’t be lazy. This morning’s mail from Submission Technology was advertising their UK specific marketing programs. They have my LinkedIn profile, they know I’m on the other side of the US from the UK.
3) Don’t lie about where you got my name. In this case, I know Submission Technology harvested it off LinkedIn because that’s the address they are sending it to. And, in fact, in the email they sent they mention they are sending this to me because we’re connected on LinkedIn. The problem is, I can find no trace of a connection between us on LinkedIn. And, yes, I did look because I generally drop connections that add me to their mailing lists.
One part of my anger at this particular spam is that they’ve appropriated a tagged email address of mine and added it to their marketing lists. That’s breaking my filtering.
After doing a little research into their company and their practices, though, I have to wonder if they’re going to sell my address. It seems that Submission Technology sells addresses to their customers, among other product offerings. Is this address that I’ve dedicated to handling LinkedIn specific emails really now going to end up getting spam from UK companies?
Based on multiple online reports (Andy Merrett and Ben Park) it doesn’t even look like unsubscribing will be sufficient to get this mail to stop.
One of the most amusing bits links that showed up was a comment on a post here from 2008. It seems that they spammed Steve Linford and were SBLed for it. I’m only guessing that since they’re not still listed they’ve figured out how to suppress Steve’s address at least.
Sending unsolicited email can be a problem for bulk senders; you risk alienating your potential customers, getting blocked and developing a poor reputation. Some of those problems can be mitigated by not being stupid.

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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:

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