on Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 11:37:34AM -0700, Cricket Liu wrote:
Hi, Tim. Hi, Steven.
On Jun 10, 2005, at 10:47 AM, Steven Champeon wrote:
FYI - there's been some question about postsnet and campaigner lately on the SURBL whitelist list.
Well, I was just subscribed to a postsnet list, managed by campaigner.
If you go to the URL to unsub, including the final '.', you get a silly Javascript popup saying "Your work has been saved to date however your session has timed out and you must re-login", hit ok, get redirected to gotmarketing.com thence to campaigner.com.
Hmm. I'm not sure why that is. I'll ask our Marketing folks to look into it.
Oh, that's really simple: the copy in the message thinks URLs are words, not functional strings that should be bracketed or otherwise kept apart from punctuation. I was merely remarking that a message ostensibly sent via postsnet also involved campaigner.com and gomarketing, all of whom have been on SURBL's radar lately. We've been trying to decide whether the fact that "some" legitimate email refers to campaigner.com means that we ought to whitelist it and let the rest of the spam through.
Note that they explicitly say "we bought the list" below. I'm surprised to see Cricket Liu spamming. Guess I'll never buy another edition of _DNS and BIND_.
I'm sorry to hear that.
I was extremely sorry to see that someone from whom I have learned so much over the years would stoop to purchasing address lists in order to spam people. Have you not been paying attention to the growing spam problem? Here we reject 65-90% of /all inbound mail delivery attempts/ as spam, and it's getting worse. And mainstream companies who spam (or who hire mainsleaze spam companies to spam for them) aren't helping matters at /all/.
My question is simple:
Why did you subscribe me to this list without my permission? If you feel that you have permission from me to subscribe me to this list, may I ask where you think you got it? Is ORA cognizant/accepting of such stupid and/or risky practices by their authors?
I'm not even sure which list "this list" is, but I'll forward your message to our Marketing folks and ask that, if we own this list, your address be deleted from it. If we simply bought the list, though, there's probably nothing we can do to delete you from the list.
If you own the list, I'd be very interested to hear how my address ended up on it. You *do* maintain a log of all subscription requests, of course, and can tell me when I subscribed, when I confirmed my subscription (via an email sent to my address to confirm that the person who subbed my address was actually /me/), from what IP address, on what day and what time, etc, right?
If not, you're essentially looking to get yourself blacklisted. And not just by SURBL or one of the other blacklists, but by a million private blacklists around the world, who are a harder lot to scrub.
If you simply bought the list, you may want to familiarize yourself and your marketing team with basic netiquette and guidelines for responsible (as opposed to merely "legal") email marketing. It's 2005 - anyone purchasing so-called "opt-in" lists in this day and age is begging to get blacklisted and have their reputation tarnished.
I realize that if you purchased the list you probably can't get me removed from the original - I've come to expect my address to be traded. Frankly, I'm astounded to see someone as apparently net-savvy as you just accepting the idea of purchasing mailing lists. I'm very, very disappointed.
Steve
Again, my apologies.
cricket