Unsubscribe means unsubscribe

But, unfortunately, some senders don’t actually think unsubscribe means stop sending mail.
Today, for instance, the nice folks at The Container Store sent me an email with an “important update to my POP! account”

Yes, that’s an address I gave them. But I don’t have any record of setting up an account. I was on their mailing list for all of 4 emails back in November 2016 before unsubscribing. But, they’ve decided they can email me despite my unsubscribe request.
They’ve cloaked this as an “Important Account Update” about some account I don’t have. In fact, when I go to their website and try and see what this oh so important account is about they tell me:


I understand legitimate account notifications might be an acceptable excuse to send mail even after the recipient opted out. This, however, was done extremely poorly. There is no record of the account that they are sending me information about. Neither the company nor I have any record of this account of mine.
At a minimum the emails should have only be sent to the folks that actually had an account. But, they weren’t.
I also have some issues with a company requiring recipients to accept email in order to continue using reward points. As a recipient, if I wanted what they were offering I might go ahead and continue receiving emails. But, I might not. It would all depend on how aggressive their email program is and how good the rewards are. As a deliverability consultant, this strikes me as a great way to create a mailing list full of unengaged users. Unengaged users lead to spam foldering and eventual failure of an email marketing program.
Whatever some executives think, and having been in this industry for a decade and I half I’m sure this is coming from the top down, this is not a good way to build an email program. You really can’t force folks to accept your email. ISPs are too protective of their users to make that a viable strategy.

Related Posts

You might be a spammer if…

… the best thing you have to say about your email practices is “They’re CAN SPAM compliant.”
… text to .gif is a vital part of your email generation process
… you have to mail from multiple ESPs in order to get good delivery
Please contribute your own in the comments.
I’d also like to thank Al for guest posting 2 days this week. Thanks, Al!

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Buying lists and other stupid marketing tricks

Back in November, I commented on Zoominfo and that they were selling senders very bad lists. At that time, Zoominfo did not have my current information. They have since rectified that problem and are now selling my information to people.
This morning, I received an email that said:

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TWSD: Lying and Hiding

Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity.
One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or choosefrequency.com or winnernotice.com advertising links at safetyurl.com or childsafeblogging.com or usakidprotect.com.
The spam all claims someone is “searching for…” at their website. The only thing is, the email address is associated with a fake name I gave while testing a website on behalf of a client. I know what website received the data and I know what other data was provided during the signup process. I also know that the privacy policy at the time said that my data would not be shared and that only the company I gave the information to would be sending me email.
Just more proof that privacy policies aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. But that’s not my real issue here.
The real issue is that I am receiving mail that is clearly deceptive. The subject lines of the emails up until yesterday were “(1) New Message – Someone Searching for You, Find Out…” Yesterday, I actually clicked through one of the messages to confirm that the emails were ending up at mylife.com. After that, the subject lines of the emails changed to “(1) New Person is Searching for You.”  I don’t know for sure that my click has caused the change in subject lines, but the timing seems a bit coincidental.
It’s not that someone, somewhere gave mylife.com bad data, or that someone typed a name into the mylife.com search engine and the mylife.com database showed that name and my email address were the same. Neither this name or this email address show up in a google search and I can say with certainty that this is a unique address and name combination given to a specific website. Therefore, the subject lines are clearly and demonstrably lies.
The spams are also coming from different domains and advertising links in different domains. The content is identical, the CAN SPAM addresses are identical. While the court may not rule this is deceptive under the rules of CAN SPAM, it certainly is an attempt to avoid domain level spam filters.
Who are mylife.com? Well, their website and the CAN SPAM address on their spam claims they are the company formerly known as reunion.com. I’ve talked about reunion.com here before. They have a history of harvesting addresses from users address books. They were sued for deceptive email practices under California law, but won the case just recently. They seem to think that the court case was permission to send deceptive email and have thus ramped up their deceptive practices.
If you are a legitimate email marketer, there are a couple take home messages here.
1) Spammers send mail with different domains, from different IP addresses, that contain identical content, landing pages and CAN SPAM addresses. Legitimate marketers should not rotate content and sends through different domains or different IP addresses. Pick your domain, pick your IP and stick with it.
1a) Spammers use randomly chosen domain names and cycle through domains frequently. Legitimate marketers must not use unrelated domains in marketing. Use a domain name that relates to your product, your industry or you.
2) Spammers send mail with deceptive subject lines. Legitimate marketers should make sure their subject lines are clear and truthful.
3) Spammers send mail in violation of the privacy policy under which information was collected. Legitimate marketers should be very careful to handle data in accordance with their privacy policies.
That’s what spammers do. Is that what you do?

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