This morning, I received an email that said:

I wanted to follow up on a previous email I sent out a couple days ago.  At Company, we offer an affordable, innovative, and in-depth marketing service that will  keep you one step ahead of your competitors.  Would you or a member of your team be interested in setting aside some time to see how this works?

I’d missed the first mail, apparently it had been generic enough (only the domain name in the subject line, and an unfamiliar name in the From: address) that I marked it as spam. It looked like a bunch of the other spam I get, it came to an address different than that on the website.

I asked the sender where he got my email address, he told me that he got it from Zoom Info. I kinda feel sorry for the guy, actually. He’s clearly some new sales guy who is just trying to make sales for his company (founded in 2008 according to their website). The problem is, his company is selling themselves as marketing experts, yet their expertise is questionable. The mail I was sent did not comply with CAN SPAM. It did not have an opt-out, nor did it have a physical postal address. Any VP of Sales in the online marketing space should know better than this.

The ironic bit of this is that the founder of this particular company is someone I’ve worked with in the past. If the email had even the slightest bit of personalization, “Hi, Laura, you worked with Our CEO at CEO’s Former Company, and we’re working on a new project we’d like to show you,” then I would have at least opened a dialog with the company. Even saying, “hey, I read your blog and would like to talk to you about our new product and see how it might work for you,” would have gotten a less chilly reception from me. Buying a list and sending a generic “let me tell you about my business model” email? Not so much.

Yes, Mr. VP of Sales, you are acting just like a spammer. This is what spammers do.

The second is an article about Zoominfo, a new group in the list selling business. Zoominfo has long been harvesting information from other sites. Now, they are offering to sell their scraped and harvested list. Their only requirement is that the buyer sign an agreement to comply with CAN SPAM. And, yes, if someone is dumb enough to buy this harvested list, they should comply with CAN SPAM as sending mail to a harvested list triggers additional penalties if or when the FTC decides to go after the sender.

Not only are Zoominfo harvesting data, they are harvesting from ancient and obscure sources. They have no current information for me, but they managed to find an email address for a job I left in 1993. They have Steve listed as an employee of “postgreSQL INC” because they harvested the postgres mailing list archives. Mickey pointed out one of Zoominfo’s sources is http://free-personal-ads-wanted-sex-partner-near-hays-kansas.themasterwithin.ca/arch/4/. You do not even need to visit that site, just look at the URL!

Zoominfo’s VP and general manager claims they send emails to people regularly, offering them the chance to opt-out. First of all, I have never received one of these, have any of you? Secondly, some of the addresses are so old opt-outs are not relevant. Finally, unless they are monitoring their delivery, which I strongly doubt given their business model, anyone buying addresses from them is going to buy lots of dead addresses. And spamtraps. Lots of spamtraps.

I am sure that people who buy and sell lists regularly will tell me that these are outliers and that most companies who sell lists have higher data collection standards. My experience suggests that these are middle of the road list brokers. They are companies who are willing to sell anything with an @ sign in it and do not care about how sending to that data affects their customers.