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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You want to sell me a list?

Over the years, some of my clients have found it expedient to give me email addresses at their domains. These addresses forward mail addressed to laura@clientsite to my own mailbox. Generally these are so I can be added to internal mailing lists and have access to their internal tools.
It’s often amusing to see the spam that comes through to those addresses. Over the last few weeks I’ve received multiple spams advertising an email appending service.
Let the irony sink in. An email appending service is sending me an email at a client company offering the client company the opportunity to append email addresses. “See how accurate our appending is!”
How accurate can a service be if they can’t even target their own spam correctly?
In addition to the appalling targeting they’re also violating CAN SPAM (no physical postal address), their website is a collection of broken links and they don’t provide any company name or information in the email or on the website.
To top it all off, the mail says, “if you’re not the right person to act on this mail, please forward this to the right person.” Followed by a standard legal disclaimer that says, “The information contained in this e-mail message and any attachments is confidential information intended only for the use of individuals or entities named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail at the originating address.”
I wonder if blogging about the utter email incompetence about mail from David Williams, Business Development (phone number: 800-961-5127) violates the confidentiality clause?

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Target acquires email addresses, exposing more customers to data breaches

As most folks now know hackers broke into Target systems last December and stole financial and other data from 110 million customers. Target has been responding to this breach reasonably well. They’ve been notifying customers that were affected and they’re providing credit monitoring for affected individuals. They seem to be totally on top of protecting their customer’s data and privacy.
Mostly.
They seem to be purchasing or otherwise acquiring email addresses from at least one major retailer in order to send out notifications about the breach to customers that never gave them email addresses. Yes, even those of us who chose not to give Target email addresses are receiving email from them.
I understand Target’s drive to contact affected users. I even appreciate that. What I don’t appreciate is that Target appears to be compromising my security in order to notify me my security was compromised. The data of mine that was compromised at Target would be credit card and possibly address information. My email address was not part of the compromise. So what does Target do? They go and acquire my email address from a third party.
Their solution to the compromise is collecting more data that is vulnerable to compromise from unrelated third parties? I’m not sure this is the most consumer friendly thing Target could do. In my case, Target sent mail to an address I’ve only given to Amazon. That means I now need to worry about my Amazon account security, on top of everything else.
Ironically, the email sent by Target tells me that I can click a link and get free credit monitoring. Then the email goes on to tell me the following:

  • Never share information with anyone over the phone, email or text, even if they claim to be someone you know or do business with. Instead, ask for a call-back number.
  • Delete texts immediately from numbers or names you don’t recognize.
  • Be wary of emails that ask for money or send you to suspicious websites. Don’t click links within emails you don’t recognize.

Don’t click links within emails I don’t recognize? You mean like the one you just sent me? With a link to a credit monitoring website?
I appreciate the notice. I don’t appreciate is that Target went out of their way to collect more information about me than I actually gave them. I am now worried about Amazon’s security as well. How did Target get an address only provided to Amazon? I don’t appreciate that my efforts to keep my information secure (not providing email address to Target) was undermined by Target themselves.
The full text of the email, with the relevant headers (munged slightly for privacy) is under the cut, if anyone is interested.

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LinkedIn shuts down Intro product

Intro was the LinkedIn product that created an email proxy where all email users sent went through LinkedIn servers. This week LinkedIn announced it is discontinuing the product. They promise to find new ways to worm their way into the inbox, but intercepting and modifying user mail doesn’t seem to have been a successful business model.

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