I was cleaning out my inbox over the weekend and found a spam that actually made me laugh.
Yes, it is spam advertising the “Official Greed[sic] Card Lottery.” It’s been 20 years since I’ve seen one of those!
Live, work and study in the USA
The American Dream Within Reach
50,000 people and their families will get a green card
Simple registration within 5 minutes
Yeah, we’ll get right on that!
I get a LOT of spam here. Most of it is marked and trivial to get rid of. Some of it is what I would call semi-legitimate. It’s a real product, but I never asked to receive any information from this company and am not actually part of their demographic. For one time things I just hit delete and move on. Life is too short to complain or opt out of every spam I get. (Tried that, got more mail)
But sometimes if the same sender keeps bothering me, I will send back an email asking them to cease contact. I recently had an occasion where someone sent an initial email trying to sell me bulk SMS, online video and other services. I ignored it because we’re not in the market for any of these services. A week later I get a followup asking why I hadn’t provided feedback to them and if there was a better person to talk to at the company. I looked for a way to opt-out of this message stream, but there wasn’t one. I send a reply telling them we were not interested in speaking to them and to please cease all communication. (“You didn’t receive feedback because I have no interest in talking to you. Please cease all future contact.” Admittedly that was terse, but it was polite.)
My request to cease communication was not well received, nor was it honored. Mind you, they first contacted me trying to sell me services that are totally off what we offer. When I asked them not to contact me, they turned it around that we’d lost business.
September’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related.
Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. We wrote a post on why it’s so important to make sure you’ve optimized your deliverability strategy and resolved any open issues well in advance of your sends. Steve covered some similar territory in his post “Outrunning the Bear”. If you haven’t started planning, start now. If you need some help, give us a call.
In that post, we talked a bit about the increased volumes of both marketing and transactional email during the holiday season, and I did a followup post this week about how transactional email is defined — or not — both by practice and by law. I also wrote a bit about reputation and once again emphasized that sending mail people actually want is really the only strategy that can work in the long term.
While we were gone, I got a lot of spam, including a depressing amount of what I call “legitimate spam” — not just porn and pharmaceuticals, but legitimate companies with appalling address acquisition and sending strategies. I also wrote about spamtraps again (bookmark this post if you need more information on spamtraps, as I linked to several previous discussions we’ve had on the subject) and how we need to start viewing them as symptoms of larger list problems, not something that, once eradicated, means a list is healthy. I also posted about Jan Schaumann’s survey on internet operations, and how this relates to the larger discussions we’ve had on the power of systems administrators to manage mail (see Meri’s excellent post here<).
I wrote about privacy and tracking online and how it’s shifted over the past two decades. With marketers collecting and tracking more and more data, including personally-identifiable information (PII), the risks of organizational doxxing are significant. Moreso than ever before, marketers need to be aware of security issues. On the topic of security and cybercrime, Steve posted about two factor authentication, and how companies might consider providing incentives for customers to adopt this model.
This morning I woke up to news that Sanford Wallace pled guilty to spamming. Again.
Sanford was one of the very early spammers (savetrees.com). He moved to email from junk faxing when Congress made junk faxing illegal in 2005. He sued AOL when AOL blocked his mail. He lost and the courts maintained that blocking spam was not a violation of the sender’s rights. Sanford then moved on to using open relays to avoid blocks. He was eventually disconnected from his backbone provider (AGIS) for abuse. Sanford sued AGIS for breach of contract and was reconnected for a brief period of time.
After his disconnection from AGIS, Sanford and a few of the other folks proposed a backbone provider that allowed bulk email marketing. That never really went anywhere.
Reading these old articles is a major blast in the past. The legal case between AGIS and Cyberpromotions was the event that led to my involvement in email marketing and spam. I even spent a Saturday afternoon in the late 90s with about a dozen people on a con call with Sanford and Walt talking about his backbone idea. My position was pretty simple: it wasn’t going to work, but as long as there was consent it was his network and he could do what he wanted.
I kinda lost track, just because he moved onto other ways of advertising and I got deeper and deeper into deliverability consulting. He did show up on my radar a few years ago when Facebook sued him for breaking into user accounts and using those accounts to spam. He lost a $711 million dollar judgement to Facebook, but given he didn’t have the resources the judge in that case recommended criminal charges.
Criminal charges were filed a few years later. Yesterday, Sanford pled guilty to fraud and criminal contempt as well as violating a court order to stay off Facebook’s network.
He now faces $250,000 in fines and up to 16 years in jail. Given his history, I expect he’ll figure out some way to still send spam even if he’s locked up.
Sanford is one of the reasons so many folks have such a low opinion of anyone who describes their business as “legitimate email marketing.” Sanford used the same phrase back in the late 90s. Of course no one, with the possible exception of him, actually believed that. But when someone like that adopts the moniker “legitimate email marketer” it’s hard to take them seriously when someone like Sanford has been using that since the late 90s.