Your purchased list … is spam.

This morning I got spam from someone selling email addresses. The mail starts:

Hi Laura,
I am aware of your expertise in the field of marketing and how well you execute your campaigns.
We specialize in customized email list services and provide global data. […]
“You are receiving this email as you have shown interest in data related solutions. Occasionally you will receive brief messages with offers and our services. Please reply UNSUBSCRIBE if you no longer want to receive messages from us”.

Yeah. No. Just. No.
trashforblog
The above message is a prime example of why spam is a problem.
They’re selling targeted email lists…

… but their targeting is SO BAD they targeted me.

They are attempting to compliment me…

... but in a way that demonstrates they are just randomly throwing words in an email.

They’re selling addresses…

… wonder if these are the folks that are selling my address and resulting in a lot more B2B spam in my inbox.

Their email violates CAN SPAM…

… because of course it doesn’t have a physical address. 

They tell me they know I’m interested in “data related solutions”…

… but I have no idea what “data related solutions” are.

Look, this is spam. No one really wants it.
This doesn’t stop companies from wanting to send spam, though. In fact, I’ve had a lot of calls recently from folks looking for deliverability help when they’re sending to B2B purchased / acquired / rented / traded lists. But there isn’t anything I can really do. The mail is unsolicited and while and most people don’t want it or don’t care about it. The filters are actually designed to block this kind of mail.
That’s something I’m not sure we discuss enough. We talk about wanted mail and inbox delivery and engagement and opens and clicks and all these measurements as part of delivery. But I’ll tell you a secret: filters are about stopping unsolicited mail. That’s right, filters use wanted as a way of measuring unsolicited. If a lot of people say the mail is unwanted then it’s probably unsolicited and it’s a target for blocking.
If you’re sending unsolicited mail, and you’re getting blocked, there isn’t a lot anyone can do for you. Anything deliverability folks tell you to do, like authentication, just makes it easier for the filters to block mail. Asking for a whitelist will just make the filter maintainers laugh. They are hearing from their users that the mail is unwanted. With opt-in data, we can present data showing that users asked for it. Without it, we are stuck with “uh, I’m sure they’ll like it if they saw it!” That’s not very persuasive.
There is a pervasive opinion among marketers that buying and selling B2B lists is OK. That unsolicited mail to businesses is acceptable. This opinion is not shared by the recipients.
Look, I’m a small business owner. Time is one of my most precious commodities. My days are full. Marketers waste my time and energy. There’s very little that I’m interested in that comes in unsolicited. I mean, OK, it gives me blog content, but it’s still a waste of time, particularly when they drop my address into marketing automation and don’t have unsub links.
That doesn’t mean I don’t like marketing email! I do. In fact, I just made another purchase today from AppSumo. I subscribe to other marketing lists, too. But those offers aren’t unsolicited and they are actually targeted and they are wanted mail. The point is, mail doesn’t have to be unsolicited to be effective and generate revenue.
 

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Buying Lists

One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM.
As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me.
I can report nothing has changed. He’s still violating CAN SPAM. He’s still claiming I have no right to post, share, spindle, mutilate or fold his spam. Well, in the interest in something, I thought I’d share the whole post this time. Just to warn folks from attempting to purchase services from appendleads.com (nice website, by the way).

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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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