spam

Spam Report 7: Case Study profiling Adweek

If you’re a marketer you will likely have read or heard of Adweek, correct? Yeah, me too. At one point I even had a shortcut in my Apple News app, which I rarely use nowadays. All news are ads, period.

Back to Adweek, out of the blue I received an email from Cindee Weiss, Production Director at Adweek. Don’t know her, never communicated with her, never signed up to anything from Adweek, as far as I know they are completely unknown to me.

I did my normal checking, which mail server, IP, domain etc. so I could report the domain. But nobody wanted to know, so I emailed Cindee and was astounded at her blatant response to my questions.

Spam Report 6: Case Study Profiling Mailrush.io

I received the following email from Keith Rainville.

Learn to build an email list of your best customers on LinkedIn or access our database of over 500 million businesses worldwide.

Then simply send the list with just an EmaiClik! [note the on-purpose spelling mistake to get through any spam filters!]

Build and send unlimited Cold Emails from the best all-in-one solution on the market.

One Monthly Charge for Unlimited Everything! All-in-one Solution!

What you get:

Build unlimited lists
Send unlimited lists
Sales sequence newsletter campaigns with unlimited email send
Linked auto-connect feature
Find emails from first name last name and company name
Find emails from domains
Chatbot solution to capture and convert visitors to leads

and much more...

Start your 7-day trial and get grandfathered in for just $99 per month.
Use Promo Code: WELCOME301 and save $30 on your first month for a limited time!

Cheers Keith Rainville

Founder/Developer

Spam Report 4: Reporting Tools

Since my counter spammerism journey, which I started at the end of March, I have managed to find many look-up tools to uncover mail servers, name servers, domain registrars, IP addresses and much more. This has allowed me to email directly to the owners of the mail or domain servers and report the abuse.

This has had very mixed results, I have to say, some will engage and get back to you and others you just don't hear anything from. It hasn't deterred me though, I knew I would learn more about spam and how it is constructed, the types of offenders and how the internet is basically flawed. Anyone who is persuaded to invest into Bitcoin derivatives I wish them luck. I can't imagine anything worse then having my money tied up in the flawed internet. Blockchain or not, how can you possible believe that when the Internet is basically flawed you would secure your hard-earned cash inside of it.

Anyway back to reporting tools. Sending direct emails to abuse@ email addresses is not really delivering the kind of results I was hoping for and then on top of that, there's one specific type of email that is, for me at least, impossible to identify its origin, mail or domain. This type of email are usually the ones that suggest that there's a bucket load of money waiting to be claimed by you, you know the ones, I should be a triple billionaire by now and of course I am not!

Spam Report 3: Case Study profiling ABL Business Ltd

Email received on 17 September, 2021 from Andy Redman, ABL Business Ltd. The individual or company is not known to me, I have never had any dealings with them, have never communicated with them or connected with them on Social Media.

Firstly the email he used to send to me isn't even my own company email. I do some freelancing for a drumming music teacher and in order to formalise communication with outside organisations I was given a company email address by the teacher. I hardly use this email and it's not in the public domain on many websites, although recently I did add this email to a Birmingham website.

Upon further investigation, I realised this was indeed a legitimate organisation and Andy Redman is real, I discovered their website and saw his name on LinkedIn too. Then I looked into the links at the bottom of the email, in particular the privacy statement. I then realised the privacy statement layout and information was exactly the same as two previous unsolicited emails I had received the previous day by Ideal Lighting and Print by Splash.

Spam Report 2: Case Study profiling BairesDev

As part of my journey uncovering email spammers, I have started publishing some of my results on LinkedIn and tagging individuals in organisations, especially the senior leaders. This strategy is definitely starting to have some impact. In the past two incidents I have received responses from the organisations involved, either by the person who has been tagged or someone who works in the organisation.

Dialogue is good, it means they are taking the exposure seriously. I’m not sure everyone knows that LinkedIn has a super powerful search engine and therefore the possibility of negative press and exposure is a very real possibility. At least I am discovering a positive method for using LinkedIn, instead of just posting adverts about what I am doing and promoting my business, which is basically how most use LinkedIn, that and of course the personal Facebook-like posts that are appearing all over these days.

Spam Report 1: A journey into the dark web!

They have finally have gotten to me, after years of being a prolific emailer and trying to circumnavigate the daily spammers, I have decided to take action. You could call it ‘war on spammers’ or ‘counterspammerism’, I’m going after them in a small way but even in a few short weeks I have been able to grow my knowledge about the ways that I can start making some impact.

This is the first of what will be several reports on my progress in an effort to share some insights, which others may wish to investigate themselves.

Just to set the scene. My computer is an Apple Mac, but because it’s 8 years old I’m on Catalina. I use Apple Mail on my Mac and my iOS devices, but the bulk of the heavy lifting of course will have to be done on the Mac as on iOS as far as I can see you can’t even interrogate the email header. Seeing as the email header is where the majority of the research takes place then all the work will have to be done on the Mac.

Dear Beneficiary Dead or Alive

We all receive spam emails, some are by legitimate spammers, you know the ones that add you to a list, where we can track down the email server they used and in some cases even unsubscribe, although that could be risky too.

And then there are the famous African inheritance emails, the ones that are usually untraceable and the only thing we can do is add them to junk and delete them. After all this time on email I am still astounded that tech companies have not been able to deal with these spam emails. We can send people into space, but we can’t stop spam emails.

Anyway this is probably the best one have received in quite a while. First of all they are offering me a fairly modest inheritance amount and secondly the subject line addresses me as either ‘Dead or Alive’. Seeing as my company name is Staying Alive UK, I couldn’t resist sharing it.

Not only is it addressed to ‘Dead or Alive’, it also asks me to confirm ‘if your are still alive’, which made me chuckle a lot.

A day in the life of a spammer…

Jason Squires is a U.K. LinkedIn trainer and spammer. I’ve never heard of him, never had contact with him, never downloaded something from him and yet, he added me to his email list. He may have forgotten about GDPR and certainly sent his email to the worst possible recipient. You see I have been unsubscribing from emails for the past decade or maybe longer, so I can spot a spam email instantly, it stands out like a big SORE thumb, BOOM!

First things first figure out via the email header which email client he used and after a bit of careful examination I found that it was elasticemail. So found their website and reached out to them, it doesn’t always work, these companies don’t usually want to admit to their paying customers using their servers to spam people, but surprisingly this one responded back very fast with a very positive answer in terms of investigating it and taking action, you can see the start of the email thread below.

Is Email Enhancing or Destroying Your Reputation?

Email was invented in 1971 and became popular during the late 90's. We've been using it seriously for 20+ years. Some of you reading this will remember how amazing it was when we all started using it. Remember your first email address? Mine was with Yahoo! Millennials will snigger at this, I know they will, some haven't even got an email address!

And although we've had enormous change with email, most of us are still basically using it for the same purpose. To send messages, share files, photos and opinions. 

And of course with all new inventions email soon became a method for spammers to hack servers and send us all emails promoting goods and services we weren't looking for. (SPAM) 

And then there is the ’Email Newsletter’. If by chance you shared your email address on a website or purchased some goods online your email address could be added to a list. The owner of the list could then keep you informed of their news, which often included promoting their goods and services too. You may have even wanted those newsletters, but now they are a pest!

Over time newsletter clients, like Constant Contact, Mailchimp and others started to emerge and provided some rules around uploading email addresses. One of those rules would be obtaining authorisation from the email owner before adding them to a list. However as long as you tick the box that confirms you have authorisation, they allow you to upload your list. And then you can legitimately email (SPAM) your contacts.

Let’s not forget Data Protection in Europe.  The Data Protection Directive (officially Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data) is a European Union directive and was adopted in 1995. It regulates the processing of personal data within the European Union. In essence it means when you hold personal data, like an email address, you must have obtained it with the owners permission and provide any recipient of your email newsletter the opportunity to unsubscribe.

Nowadays the best process for obtaining authorisation for using someone’s email address is using a double opt-in process. That means the email owner has to confirm authorisation and knows without a doubt that they are being added to an email list. This is by far the best process in my view. BUT many don’t bother with this process.

With the creation of LinkedIn, it means that your connections have access to your email address. They can download your email address to add to their email list whether they have your authorisation or not and then start to email you their newsletters (SPAM). 

I've been unsubscribing from newsletters for over 4 years and receive very few unsolicited emails these days. However I still receive around 4-6 newsletters I never signed up for per month. Plus the instances of poor practices in those emails, where you are unable to unsubscribe seems to occur more often. I send those senders a polite email to ask how I got added and ask to be unsubscribed. Below is the text of a recent (March 2016) email I sent to the sender of an unsolicited email I received.

You really need to be considering your ‘Email Newsletter Strategy’. Are you really adding value to your readers or are you promoting, selling, funnelling and spamming?

Now let’s discuss the ‘email signature’. Have you got one? How much detail do you think should be in your email signature and do you really believe that the receiver needs all that detail? The chances are that the receiver is already known to you, you’re probably already connected on Social Media somewhere and they more than likely have your business card. Here are some of the crazy things I see in email signatures:

  1. Email address. Why? They have just received your email with your email address on it, why on earth do they need it in your email signature as well?
  2. Website address. If you using a business email address then they will already know the domain address of your website, after all it’s in your email address. And if it’s personal email then you won’t need to share a website address do you? And small businesses who still use a free personal email address should really examine what they are doing to their Brand.
  3. All your Social Media channels. Do you really think they have time to click through to all those URL’s and connect or follow you there? If they were so interested in you, they would take the time to search for you on those channels anyway and may have already done so before they even get an email from you. The chances are that you’ve also already done this and at least have connected with them on LinkedIn. It’s totally redundant and just lengthens the email message.
  4. Logos and Images. And although Broadband speed has increased and  mobile internet is getting faster, attaching images to your email is totally impractical. Branding I hear you say? Rubbish! Have you seen how your Brand gets destroyed when you start emailing back and forth and all those images get removed, scrunched and destroyed in some way. The email thread is a mess, more scrolling required to discover the real text that has to be read and with all those missing image links, additional contact information the important text can easily be missed, often resulting in quotes like ‘I never saw that message’. I’m not surprised, it was hidden in between unnecessary promotional nonsense.
  5. Street address. Seriously? You’re kidding right? Why would they need that in an email? You are emailing each other, not sending each other postcards. If you do have to visit you almost always look up their website and find out directions and jump on to Google Maps.
  6. Disclaimer. Thank you 80’s  and 90’s lawyers! They all scared the s..t out of us, because we weren’t sending letters any longer and it was entirely possible that your email could end up arriving somewhere else and then you’ve said something so awful that they could take you to court. OMG! The disclaimer is often 3 times longer than your actual email message. And you really think it protects you? The receiver has nothing better to do then read your disclaimer every time they receive an email from you? (Raising my eyes to heaven)
  7. Environmental Statement about printing. How many folks actually spend time printing emails out, apart from lawyers? Enough said.

If this sparked any interest, you can read this thought-provoking article by Kevin Zawacki @kevinzawacki on Slate.com http://slate.me/1REJekw

This is 2016 and none of the above is needed any longer. Let’s use email as it was intended. Keep it basic, short and to the point. and Don’t copy the world to ‘cover your a..’.

Reduce your email signature to your mobile number and one keyword for search. After all you don’t have a massive email signature on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube etc. The world is changing, please join me in spreading the word about email signatures and get them reduced to just two bits of information.

Email won’t exist forever, certainly unlikely in larger organisation. There are now other products on the market who make internal communication more productive and simpler. Email is likely going to be reinvented by Social Media and Messaging apps like Slack, Asana, Trello, Yammer and others? I’m looking forward to it, because it could signal the end of email as we know it. Yippee, no more spamming!

So let’s ask the question again. ‘Is Email Enhancing or Destroying Your Reputation?’

Answers on a postcard please! Just kidding, comments below please or via email if you wish, michael@guess the domain.com? No seriously, I need you to guess the domain. For starters it's easy if you did some research and secondly, I would like to avoid the spiders adding me to a list.

@stayingaliveuk