About a week after my last post, The Value of Email Appending – and I’m not making this up – somebody somewhere seems to have bought my email address in some sort of an email append. It’s like blog fodder from heaven….
Like most email recipients one of the first things that I look at in determining whether or not to open a message is who it’s from, followed by the subject line for an idea of what the message is about. Being an email geek if a sender name / subject line combo looks like something stupid that I might be able to blog about I’ll sometimes take a look. This time I was glad that I did and here we are….
The email append culprit this time is some guy named Steve G. Jones and he’s asking me for my confirmation. Confirmation for what@f2 As it turns out, Steve is under the impression that I’m a fan of self improvement.
I smoke, chug green tea, seldom wear shoes – and when I do rarely with socks – shave one or two times a week (maybe), and think that the answer to all life’s questions can be found in little chocolate doughnuts and assorted other cookies and snacky cakes. While that may make me an excellent candidate for self improvement, I’m not interested.
It gets better; Steve is from some outfit called, “betterlivingwithhypnosis”, and he wants me to subscribe to – not confirm a prior subscription as was alluded to in the subject line – his newsletter, for which I will receive in appreciation a free gift in the form of his hypnotherapy recording, “Power Your Mind To Achieve Unlimited Confidence”. Unless Steve knows something that I don’t (maybe he moonlights for “betterlivingwithesp”), I don’t think I lack confidence, but I digress….
So, an email from an unknown sender asking me to confirm something that I never initiated turns into, “But before we send you this, we need to be certain we have your permission.” Two sentences later it’s asking me once again to confirm a subscription that I never made so that they can add me to their newsletter list.
So what is it@f3 Did I subscribe and you want me to confirm that I did, or do you want me to subscribe to something under the guise of confirming the subscription I never made@f4 Or@f5@f6@f7@f8@f9 It seems like an awful lot of verbal acrobatics to me….
Maybe this is what they call an “opt-in append”…. /sarcasm
Anyway, as you can see in the message (go ahead, click it; it won’t “append” you), the “confirmation” returns to the sender. Not Steve, but NetAtlantic.com. And guess what one of NetAtlantic’s “services” are@f10 That’s right, “email appending“. They don’t sell or rent email addresses, no, here it’s called “appending” – a much “nicer” word….
So, when it comes to my email address in this instance – my personal and not public address – either NetAtlantic is attempting to “opt-in append” me for Steve or has rented my address that I never provided or gave permission to mail, to Steve, or they allow their users to upload and mail to purchased email lists. It doesn’t matter which as none are very becoming.
For those with the fleeting thought that maybe I’d made an on or offline purchase from “betterlivingwithhypnosis” I can only ask, “seriously!?” Not unless I was hypnotized and don’t remember…. That kind of blows the whole, “they just wanted to add your email address to your postal data”, doesn’t it?
As I said last week,
The value of email appending doesn’t come from adding email addresses to data that you have, it comes from adding data to email addresses that you have.
Unfortunately for Steve, he didn’t have any of my information – postal or electronic – so the only thing that NetAtlantic (who, remember, also never received my permission) can “append” is my email address and whatever else they harvested somewhere to Steve, who doesn’t have my email or any other address.
Email Appending – when it’s adding an email address where one wasn’t – is just a pretty name for buying and selling email lists….
You don’t remember that time we got hypnotized@f2 🙂
@Rory – is that the time when you said, ‘hey, let’s give them our postal addresses and not our email addresses, and let’s see if they can “append” us’? 🙂
You know, I just realized that the message I was sent by Steve & his friends at NetAtlantic doesn’t carry an opt-out mechanism or postal address as required by the (you) CAN-SPAM Act…. Hmmm….
But NetAtlantic is a member of MAAWG so it must be legit. Musta been that late night with Rory.
John,
You smoke, chug green tea, seldom wear shoes – and when you do rarely with socks – shave one or two times a week (maybe). We are clearly twin sons of different mothers. Maybe what they really need is an email newsletter from you about Donut Wellness.
I say you should email them a newsletter every hour about the benefits of being a scruffy, shoeless, tea drinking smoker with a little donut fetish. Invite them to a seminar, where in person, you can beat them to death with an appendage. Preferably one of thiers.
Cheers, Chris (Your brother from a different mother)
You weren’t hypnotized. I’d actually blinded you with science. Sorry about that. 🙂
Too funny. The only thing that really would scare me is if John admitted to wearing socks and sandals. Please say it isn’t so. BTW socks with Crocks is just as bad.
As for Chris Donald, I love the appendage reference. Quite fitting for an email append article.
John….when I snap my fingers on the count of three you will be forget this ever happened. 1. 2. 3. (snap)
Hi John,
It looks like you didn’t get appended – you got spammed. Our client did not use appending, but went outside our TOS and this is being addressed. Red Pill Email in this case worked like a ‘super-spam complaint’. Thank you.
A true appending request would include unsubscribe links and the physical address, and is only used in very specific situations. We agree that the best way to use this is to gather data for existing opt-in emails. You raise a legit concern whether asking for email opt-ins, by email, from customers with existing postal mailing addresses, is really just spam.
I appreciate the chance to be part of the ongoing conversation about this.
-TB @NA
@Tom – I appreciate NA’s renewed focus on enforcing its TOS. It’s unfortunate when a sender ignors those little agreements, but I’m glad that I was able to bring it to your attention.
I really want to believe that you agree with my position on email appending, but am having a hard time with NA’s hosted page (https://www.netatlantic.com/emailmarketing/freshaddress.html) that includes, “If your customer database has no email addresses and you want to start marketing electronically, you need B2B and B2B Email List Appending”
I don’t know what that says to you, but to me it looks like using “appending” as a fancy word for selling email addresses.
It does look like selling emails, but we don’t do that, and we’re fundamentally against it. If a potential client even breathes the word, the jig is up. When a list is uploaded, our system looks for the standard types of bad addresses and blocks the account if it finds them.
If someone buys a list, they get a bunch of emails and spam them, getting their ESP blocked – or into hot water with important people in the social universe :-).
Appending is different: The client never gets the emails unless the recipients agree. They never even get to send that unasked for ‘opt-in’ request – FreshAddress sends that. The client only gets the emails of recipients who agree. That’s appending. That’s how I knew instantly you did not get an appending email. You got spam. And for that we are sorry.
-TB @NA
@Tom – I can only speak to what I see posted on the NA site, and to me it says, “if you don’t have email addresses we can ‘append’ some to your list”. I think we all know my thoughts on that.
But just for fun let’s say that some “appending” service wants to send me an email to opt-in to someone else’s list, if I didn’t opt-in to that service to send me opt-in offers…. well, I think you see where I’m going with this…. 😉