Gambling with cold email

I don’t think it’s a secret that I don’t like cold outreach mail. I do not want to receive it. I do not help companies get it delivered.

One of the concessions I’ve made is to jump through the hoops at the companies selling my address to invoke my rights under GDPR. I have done my absolute best to stop companies from selling my data, so I don’t have to deal with the spam.

What’s been interesting is watching these companies go out and find other addresses for me and my company. “We acquired laura-tag and are now selling that data.” In all cases the tag makes it clear they acquired the address in some way other than opt-in. The company the tag was given to did not have permission to sell my address. In short: all of those tagged addresses are verified spamtraps.

I’ve tried to keep my data out of the commercial spam databases. In their determination to slurp up any data they can from any source, legal or not, they have acquired a wide range of spamtrap addresses associated with my name and my company. That’s where I draw the line. I did my bit, I jumped through the hoops. They decided that they still want to be able to sell my data to companies. I’m not going to spend my time cleaning stolen data out of their database.

Last week a client told me one of the divisions of their company was buying addresses from a well known vendor. That data has a 12% hard bounce rate. TWELVE PERCENT. To my mind, that’s fraud. If I buy 100ml of something, I expect to receive 100ml of that, not 88.

The only thing I can conclude is that list sellers don’t care about the quality of their product. They make money by selling quantity, not quality. It costs money to acquire quality data, so they just don’t bother. The result is list sellers are actively selling bad data to their customers. In fact, they’re actively defrauding their customers by not doing any data hygiene. Their data is full of spamtraps, hard bounces and who knows what else.

What really confuses me, is that marketers have managed to convince themselves that this is somehow a winning marketing strategy. They go back to these vendors time and time again, knowing that the data is bad. Maybe it’s like the whole AI thing, and they’re just gambling. They’ve managed to convince themselves if they buy enough addresses, then the next time they’ll be good.

Make it make sense.

The aggressive tactics of the list selling companies and the entire cold outreach deliverability companies might be reaching the end of the line.

Just recently Validity announced they’re publishing the Heatwave Domain blocklist listing domains using synthetic reputation warming or actively involved in unsolicited outreach.

SURBL is also listing domains actively involved in cold outreach. They also appear to be escalating listings to the corporate domains. I had a sales interaction this week with someone looking for help getting their main domain delisted. When I asked for the delisting denial from SURBL it said, in part:

After reviewing the associated domains and behavior patterns, we have identified a number of concerns that are not in line with accepted email practices or SURBL’s standards for ethical conduct in the email ecosystem.

Observed Activity

Our analysis indicates that you are engaging in cold email outreach using lookalike or derivative domain(s) that appear to serve primarily as a means of:[sic]
Your outreach included at least one of the items as described below:

* Obfuscating the identity of your primary domain or brand
* Avoiding direct reputation impact on your main domain
* Circumventing detection or filtering systems
* Fake captcha to disallow visitors by default
* Warming services to fake domain reputation
* Not even a website but explaing[sic] its a legit buisness[sic]

My sale mailbox suggests that filtering has significantly ramped up on cold email in the past few months. I’m getting dozens of inquiries a week from company who are struggling to get cold email delivered.

Good.

This really feels like the anti-spam filters have decided they’re done with cold outreach. Business filters and blocklists are developing methods to effectively block cold email and the companies that use it.

In the past, I’ve heard cold emailers justify their tactics because they’re not getting blocked or put on any blocklists. Well. That’s no longer true, now is it?

FYI: I will be speaking next week at the Canadian Email Summit about how do we make any data driven decisions about deliverability when our data is so squishy. Make sure to say HI! if you’re there.

Turscar Isle

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