But my purchased list is TARGETED!!!

listshoppingcartI hear this all the time. But, y’know what? It’s BS. Total BS.
In the last month, I’ve gotten “targeted” messages (that escaped my filters) from the following companies who purchased lists.

  1. A company offering Agile and Scrum classroom workshops… in Australia. (they know they’re spamming: they are hiding behind domain privacy)
  2. Laura Ashley offering me in store specials… in the UK. (their ESP doesn’t seem to respond to abuse complaints)
  3. A company offering hair growth products… shipped from the UK. (their ESP responded quite politely and are on top of things regarding my complaint)
  4. A company offering to let me invest in student housing… in the UK (they know they’re spamming: they have fake whois data)
  5. A company offering “secret bargains”, an affiliate of Amazon EU… advertising amazon.co.uk (this one is currently SBLed, but the spam hasn’t stopped, and has false whois records)

These are a few of the messages I’ve actually seen, the ones that escape my filters.
I’m sure the people who purchased the email addresses involved (and these messages are going to 3 different email addresses) paid good money for them. I’m sure they were told these were targeted messages.
The people who sold the addresses to them don’t know what they’re selling. I won’t go so far as to say they’re lying, but the companies that purchased the lists didn’t get what they thought they were.
These addresses are not only worthless to the buyers, in some cases they’re actively harmful.  ESPs involved have discovered their customers are violating their AUP just for mailing to me. In other cases, my address was on lists with dozens, if not hundreds, of Spamhaus spamtraps and that IP is now on the SBL.
This is just one small slice of one person’s mail stream. I actually don’t think my addresses get sold much more than the average persons, in fact I’m pretty sure I get less mail from purchased lists than other people. I know for a fact there are ESPs that block everything to my domain – much to my chagrin when one of their customers hires me to do an analysis and it take weeks to figure out why they can’t send me mail.
Much of my incoming sales in the last year have been mailers who, previously, were successfully buying lists and mailing them. Filters are getting better at blocking this mail, and a lot of businesses who are purchasing lists are discovering that their deliverability is in the toilet. The pattern is mirroring what happened to co-reg lists a few years ago. Filters got better and a lot of co-reg companies couldn’t stay in business because deliverability was so low. While I don’t think the market for purchased lists is going away – it’s too easy and too cheap to ever go away – I do think that it’s a challenge for a lot of companies.
With some customers we’ve worked out a transition plan, to get them away from reliance on purchased lists in the long term. They’re comfortable with the process and while it is a change, it’s on a scale they can financially manage. Other companies have looked at the finances and decided not to change and just struggle with the poor deliverability.
Overall, delivery to purchased lists is tough. And I don’t really see it getting any easier for buyers.
 

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May 2015: The Month in Email

Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures.
In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of the ESPs that have a clearly stated policy that they will not tolerate purchased lists. This should be valuable ammunition both for ESPs and for email program managers when they asked to use purchased lists. Let us know if we’re missing any ESPs by commenting directly on that post. We also shared an example of what we saw when we worked with a client using a list that had been collected by a third party.
In other best practices around addresses, we discussed all the problems that arise when people use what they think are fake addresses to fill out web forms, and gave a nod to a marketer trying an alternate contact method to let customers know their email is bouncing.
We also shared some of the things we advise our clients to do when they are setting up a mailing or optimizing an existing program. You might consider trying them before your own next send. In the “what not to do” category, we highlighted four things that spammers do that set them apart from legitimate senders.
In industry news, we talked about mergers, acquisitions and the resulting business changes: Verizon is buying AOL, Aurea is buying Lyris, Microsoft will converge Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail, and Sprint will no longer support clear.net and clearwire.net addresses.
Josh posted about Yahoo’s updated deliverability FAQ, which is interesting reading if you’re keeping up on deliverability and ESP best practices. He also wrote about a new development in the land of DMARC: BestGuessPass. Josh also wrote a really useful post about the differences between the Mail From and the Display From addresses, which is a handy reference if you ever need to explain it to someone.
And finally, I contributed a few “meta” posts this month that you might enjoy:

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Purchased Lists and ESPs

After some thought, I’ve decided to remove a few ESPs from this list based on personal experience with them allowing customers to send to purchased lists. If your company has disappeared and you want to come back, you’ll need to actually stop the spam coming from your network. Every company that’s been removed has received a complaint from me specifically mentioning the address was purchased and allowed that same customer to continue spamming the same address. Deal with your spam and we can talk about reinstatement. 

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What not to do when buying lists

Saturday morning I check my mail and notice multiple emails from the DMA. Yes, I got three copies of an email from the US Direct Marketing Association with the subject line Kick It Up A Notch With The DMA Career Center. It seems the DMA are buying addresses from various companies. Because I use tagged email addresses, this means their naive de-duping doesn’t realize that laura-x and laura-y are the same email address. Of course, they’ve also managed to send to an untagged email address, too. I have no idea where they got that particular address; I’m sure I’ve never handed that address over to the DMA for any reason.
Saturday afternoon, I check one of the professional filtering / anti-spam mailing list.  Some subscribers are asking for copies of spam from 97.107.23.191 to .194. They’d seen a lot of mail to non-existent email addresses from that range and were looking to see what was going on and who was sending such bad mail. Multiple people on the list popped up with examples of the DMA mail.
Sunday morning, I checked the discussions wherein I discovered the DMA was added to the SBL (SBL 202218, SBL 202217, SBL 202216). It seems not only did they hit over a hundred Spamhaus spamtraps, they spammed Steve Linford himself.

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