Today’s spammers are…

I don’t have time to name and shame all the email spam I get but I will continue to highlight a few in the hope that it might actually make a difference and make the industry sit up and take notice and change their ways of doing business and running campaigns. It feels like there is a complete disregard of consumers as *real* people. These companies are suffering from TDC, aka Thinly Disguised Contempt – often seen in retail environments but is now spilling over into digital. They seem to have forgotten that *data* isn’t just *data*. It is actually attached to someone real, with a heartbeat and thoughts and feelings and who is ‘not just a number’ or a record on the database. It’s not just about conversion rates and click throughs and a numbers game. This is about real live people. And these email spam companies are wasting real live people’s time, bandwidth and testing their patience.

So an update on Daily Picture / Mikkelsen Media. Their UK MD did call me an did apologise and did assure me I’d been taken off the database. He even rang me to check that I hadn’t got anything from them. So I thought, ok, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt…. And then today, they send me more junk email. If their systems are so broken that an email address cannot be removed from the database, they have no business in sending out any emails at all I would suggest.

And another new spammer on the list is Cabestan who allegedly do email campaigns for the likes of Symantec. Well they send me an email to a *completely made up address* today selling me life cover so this is very much a consumer-based service not a work-related one so consumer laws do apply as I understand it.

Here’s the small print from the email:

Click is a brand licensed to Castle Publicity International Ltd registered in Gibraltar, company registration number (84755) at 932 Europort. Click Financial Ltd is the service provider for Castle Publicity International Ltd. Click Financial Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority, registered number 311877. Registered in England and Wales at: Click House, Bear Lane, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7LG. Registered Number: 04183791.
*Policies from £2.50 a month, premium subject to individual circumstances.

If you don't recognize who used the Cabestan UK service to send you a given message, you can report it to us as spam by sending it to abuse@cabestan.co.uk. We receive, investigate, catalog, and take action based on these complaints. If you're worried that we would simply "list wash" your address without further investigation, feel free to report the message to whatever spam reporting entity you feel most comfortable working with. Spamcop at www.spamcop.net provides an easy way to report unwanted mail as spam.

Interesting that they suggest I tell spamcop. I’ve emailed them and suggested reporting them to the Information Commissioner.

Spam, spam and more spam. Companies like these are spoiling it for legitimate email marketers and will ultimately make email marketing, and arguably email itself, a very unattractive proposition indeed.

Technorati Tags: spam,email spam,junk email,spammers,email marketing

And today’s spammers are

Trifle Solutions I’ve tried to get off Shahida Afzal’s list for at least a year to no avail. And of course there’s no-one to speak to to sort it out. Let’s see if the message I left gets actioned.

Vitesse Media – these guys have bought a dud email address as it’s one I don’t actively use. Shame on the email sales house who sold it to them.

Fleet Vehicle Tracking – ditto

The National Business Awards which is run by  CMP Information also used not one but *three* dud email addresses using one of my domains. They’re an information house. They sell this data on. It’s ridiculous. They’re selling out of date, made-up data and there’s no way to tell the difference between good data and bad.

Message Takers – particularly insidious as it’s disguised as a personal email from someone who sounds like he’s quite high up in business. This could fool some of the more naive SMEs out there.

There’s more email spam and email spammers. Unfortunately.

Email marketing is so very very broken.

Technorati Tags: spam,email spam,email marketing,spammers,junk email

Don’t spam me please otherwise I’ll get nasty

and write about you here. You have been warned.

I’ve had enough of DailyPicture. I get rubbish from them every day in my inbox. I’ve no idea how or when or if I ever signed up to their email list. I routinely unsubscribe every day and it’s never worked as they keep sending me spam email. This has been going on for weeks, if not months. And I’ve had enough already. I don’t like email spam or email spammers. Wasting my time and wasting my bandwidth.

There are no contact details on their website. The only clue as to who they’re owned by is in their Terms and Conditions which says they’re owned by Mikkelsen Media.

So I call Mikkelsen Media to find out how to unsubscribe. Someone answers the phone. I say ‘Please can you tell me how to unsubscribe from Daily Picture as I press the unsubscribe button every day but you still keep sending me sh1t’ [Excuse the French, but I’m really cross about this]. Her answer, in a fairly disinterested, I get this all the time, kind of manner, ‘oh, I think it’s broken, I’ll look into it’. And as far as she was concerned that was the end of the conversation. I just managed to get a word in before she hung up to ask her why she hadn’t taken down my details and that if something didn’t happen, I’d be reporting them to the Information Commissioner for breaking the rules. So reluctantly, she took down my email address. What she will do with it, who knows.

Let’s see if I still get spam email tomorrow then…

Technorati Tags: spam,email,junk email,spam email,spammers,data privacy

Wednesday linkage

Some of these links are a little out of date as I've been away from my puter but I thought it was worth capturing them anyway just for the record. They're in no particular order...

• Mobile music price scandal (well billshock based on data charges) is a hot topic. Flat rate, easy to understand data plans are the answer IMHO and although we're moving towards that, we're not fully there yet.
  

• On device portals still going strong with Picsel powering KTF mags in Korea

• Mobile spam alienates users. Getaway! Of course it does, d'oh! Remember spam is in the eye of the beholder.

"The survey, carried out by research company GfK NOP, found that 64 per cent of users admitted to being annoyed by marketing offers received from mobile service providers. The survey also found that 70 per cent of phone users found the offers irrelevant to them.

The strategy of texting or phoning users with unsolicited offers appears to be failing with only 11 per cent of the 752 respondents surveyed buying products as a result of receiving an offer from their operator."

Of course, what they're missing here, is that an eleven per cent response rate is very high compared with other marketing methods. And in fact, if a network operator is sending a message to their own customer it isn't *legally* spam although it may be perceived as spam by the recipient if it's unwanted.

• Personalise your mobile with death and destruction in China... not sure why you'd want to, but hey, there's probably a market for it, unfortunately.

• Mobile advertising is working according to 2ergo and o2 (well we kinda knew that already from Admob's success with serving over 5 billion ads to date...)

• Turn your website or blog content into a phone call with Unwired Nation (sounds similar to one of the things that Spinvox can do)

• T-Mobile's video poker service has had over 60,000 visits since launch last year and also celebrates a £25,000 video poker winner soon after it's first £20,000 winner on mobile roulette

• World of Warcraft is working on a full mobile solution for their WoW gameplayers and has set the ball rolling with an interim solution for keeping up to date with what your character is up to. I wonder how long it will take for the experience of WoW, Second Life et al to become fully mobile?

• Can the iphone become a gaming platform? More hype or is there some substance to this? Not sure...

• Buy a domain, reboot your server, add emails, pay your bill, get support and more - on the go - from the world's first iPhone enabled web hosting control panel. Simple, intuitive and 100% iPhone compliant, with more to come from MediaTemple. Is this innovation or fad?