Appending in a nutshell

A few months ago a colleague sent me, and every other person on his overly large LinkedIn list, an email looking for some help hiring. It starts off with “Greetings LinkedI Connections” and ends with… an unsubscribe link.

P.S. If you don’t want to hear from me, here’s an unsubscribe link – that’s the easiest way. My LinkedIn network has gotten so ridiculously large that [unfortunately] I have to use an ESP to send messages like this out – which I do very infrequently – maybe a handful of times a year – I promise. 🙂

The part that really annoyed me was this person didn’t use my LinkedIn address. No, instead they found a different address for me and used that for their blast1 email. I pointed out to them that the address they mailed wasn’t my LinkedIn address. They replied they knew, that they’d mapped all their LinkedIn connections to corporate email addresses.
I asked them not to do that with my email address in the future, at which point they unfriended me on LinkedIn because it was easier.

This is the major problem with appending. I have an address associated with my LinkedIn account. It’s the address I have dedicated to handling requests from my LinkedIn network. But this person decided that it was better to use a different address to send me this email. Why? Dunno, you have to ask them. Probably because they thought, somehow, they’d get a better response if they ended up in my “primary” mailbox.
I suspect this person doesn’t like Gmail tabs either.
There are two major points I want to make with this story.
The first is that it’s a really bad idea to make assumptions about which email address to use for people, especially when they have given you an address to use. I do check my LinkedIn folder regularly but I do it on my time. My corporate address is for business. It’s for my clients, employees, and customers. Random requests for networking? I want those emails to go into my networking folder (and, yes, it really is named “networking”).
The second is, when someone says “please don’t do that again” don’t get all huffy about it. That only makes you look petulant and thin-skinned. In this case, the sender is an executive for a large player in the email space. Do you really think I’m going to recommend them to my clients? Fair or unfair, the interaction was unpleasant.
This is a very personal example of appending. A single person decided to find an address for me and specifically use that instead of the one I gave them. This was appending, but not in bulk. Nevertheless, it was someone else deciding they could override my decisions because they wanted to get in my inbox. It’s rude.
It’s no less rude when thousands of addresses are automatically appended to a list. In fact, that’s even more rude. Instead of just one annoyed person, there are thousands. Appending is a bad practice, whether it’s one or one million.

1: Yes, I called it a blast. It was a blast. Even the sender admits it’s a blast. They’re not doing anything other than importing hundreds of (collected, not opted-in) email addresses into an ESP and sending the same email to everyone of them, whether or not it’s relevant.

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Opening the mail it looks like a fairly generic “Oops, we lost a class-action lawsuit, have $2 worth of worthless internet points!” email from Sony; no mention of Litmus at all. My first thought is that Mail.app has managed to scramble it’s summary database and it’s pulling summaries from the wrong email, as I am on a Litmus mailing list or two, but nothing else looks off.
Digging around inside the source of the mail I do find a bunch of tracking gifs from emltrk.com, which is a Litmus domain so there is a Litmus connection there somewhere. Curious.
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This showed up in my mailbox earlier today:
Pluckyou
The tweet in question
pluckyou2
From Crunchbase: “Pluck is an email prospecting tool that gives you the email addresses of the people tweeting about subjects related to your business.”
Prospecting: another name for spamming. Look, I know that you want to sell you’re newest, greatest product to the world. But just because I tweet something with a # that you think is relevant to your product doesn’t mean that I want to get your spam. I also know it’s hard to get attention and find prospects; I’m a small business owner, too and I need to market my own services. But spamming isn’t a good idea. Ever.
There’s been a significant increase in this kind of spam “to help your business” lately. It’s a rare day I don’t get something from some company I’ve never heard of trying to sell me their newest product. It might be something if they tried a contact or two and then went away. But they’ll send mail for weeks or months without getting an answer. Look, silence IS an answer and it means you need to go away and leave your prospects alone.
Unfortunately, there are services out there that sell a product that let you “automatically follow up” with your prospects. Pluck up there uses one of them, as that’s who’s handling all the links in the message. In fact, if you go to the bare domain (qcml.io) they talk a good anti-spam game. “Die, spammers, die.” I reported the message to them. I’m not expecting them to actually do anything, and I’m not expecting a response.
It’s just spam under another name. There’s no pretense that it’s anything else. Even if it’s sent in a way that makes it look like a real person typed the message, like QuickMail offers. “All emails will come straight out of your personal inbox as though you typed them yourself.” As if you typed them yourself.
The worst part is there’s no real way to stop the mail. I can’t unsubscribe. The companies selling the software don’t provide any guidance to their customers about what the law requires. Take the message from Pluck that started the post. It violates CAN SPAM in multiple ways. Moreover, the address they used is not publicly associated with my twitter handle, which means they’re doing some harvesting somewhere. That means treble penalties under CAN SPAM.
I could reply and ask them to stop mailing me. I’ve done that a couple times with a message that says, “Please don’t email me any more.” I’ve got to tell you, some people get really mad when you ask them not to email you. Some just say yes, but others are really offended that you asked them to stop and get abusive. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t ask any more because of that one person who decides to harass, threaten and scream at me. Sure, it’s maybe 1 in 5, but I don’t have the time or energy to figure out who is going to be receptive and who isn’t. I don’t have time for that. No one has time for that.
I’m expecting that filters are going to catch up eventually and these types of mail will be easier to filter out. Until then, though, small business owners like myself are stuck in a place where we have to deal with spam distracting us from our business. At least I get blog content out of it.
 
 
 

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