Mike might be spamming, but why?

laura
Industry
July 27, 2017

I’ve been talking a lot about ongoing B2B spam. That is, where senders drop your address into some sort of automation, that sends mail from gmail or amazon and just spams and spams and spams. This is what my mailbox looked like this morning

Yes, every one of those emails is sent to the same address. “you are still using the address laura-info@…” Well, no, actually. That was the original address I used as part of our contact on the first iteration of the WttW website. I stopped using that address somewhere around 2002? 3? It’s been a very long time in any case.
Folks, B2B spam is still spam. It doesn’t matter if you register a new domain and use Gmail as your outbounds as a way to avoid filters.
It doesn’t matter…

… if it’s to a business address.

… if you think it’s relevant to the recipient.

… if you correctly de-dupe your list.

… if it doesn’t look like this in the recipients mailbox.

This is a blatant example that makes it clear Mike is a spammer. I was going to write about how I was sure that Mike would tell you he was a real business person, selling a real product. Then I tried to go to his website after pulling off everything after the domain name. It redirects to Facebook. … mmmkay. We’ve just passed legitimate business to out and out spammer.

Now I’m intrigued

I drop the domain name into Google to see what that can tell me about it. 3rd hit is Scamdex showing an exact copy of the message I got. Hey, that’s a public link, so I clicked on it. That, too redirected to Facebook.
Hrm… So what’s going on here? Why is Mike sending out so much crap without a real website on it? I suspect that someone bought a Really Old List. More than 15 years old. My guess is, they went to a company that offered data hygiene services. In this case, the data hygiene is spamming out dozens of email to the addresses on the list. Any clicks, even on the unsub or report this links is added to a list of live users. The cleaned list then goes through a few more iterations of the spam / clean. Then it goes through a few iterations of “real” mail where complainers and non responders are removed. Then it’s dubbed “clean” and can be moved to any ESP out there.
They’ve taken off the dead addresses. They’ve taken off the people who will complain. What they’ve got left is a list that doesn’t look bad to metrics. I mean opens and clicks are going to be low, but, eh, no one has ever lost their ESP simply due to low open and click rates. (this is where one of you jumps in and tells me a horror story of being cut off… I’m pretty sure there were other factors involved, even if the final message to you was ‘low open and click rates’.)

What’s the point

Well, my initial point was going to be that mail like this was still spam, even if it advertised a legitimate company. But I was doing the lookups and research as I was writing the blog post so it kinda went off the rails when I discovered it wasn’t a real company. Then I started wondering about what they could be doing and why they were doing this.
What’s the point of the email? Best I can come up with is list hygiene. There may be something with the phone number, as well, but there’s no way I’m calling it to find out. If anyone does, feel free to comment.

August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time. It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
In spam news, the self-proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace is still spamming, despite numerous judgments against him and his most recent guilty plea this month. For anyone else still confused about spam, the FTC answered some questions on the topic. It’s a good intro or refresher to share with colleagues. We also wrote about the impact of botnets on the inbox (TL;DR version: not much. The bulk of the problem for end users continues to be people making poor marketing decisions.) In other fraud news, we wrote about a significant spearphishing case and how DMARC may or may not help companies protect themselves.

Equivocating about spamtraps

What is a spamtrap? According to a post I saw on Twitter:

Organizational security and doxxing

The security risks of organizational doxxing.
These are risks every email marketer needs to understand. As collectors of data they are a major target for hackers and other bad people. Even worse, many marketers don’t collect valid data and risk implicating the wrong people if their data is ever stolen. I have repeatedly talked about incidents where people get mail not intended for them. I’ve talked about this before, in a number of posts talking about misdirected email. Consumerist, as well, has documented many incidents of companies mailing the wrong person with PII. Many of these stories end with the company not allowing the recipient to remove the address on the account because the user can’t prove they own the account.
I generally focus on the benefits to the company to verify addresses. There are definite deliverability advantages to making sure email address belongs to the account owner. But there’s also the PR benefits of not revealing PII attached to the wrong email address. With Ashley Madison nearly every article mentioned that the email address was never confirmed. But how many other companies don’t verify email addresses and risk losing personally damaging data belonging to non customers.
Data verification is so important. So very, very important. We’ve gone beyond the point where any big sender should just believe that the addresses users give them are accurate. They need to do it for their own business reasons and they need to do it to prevent incorrect PII from being leaked and shared.