Welcome to the murky world of e-mail list sales
Jack Love was shocked when clients told him another firm had offered them his customer list. But his mood quickly turned to anger.
A firm called EmailAppenders had sent e-mail messages to his customers, pitching the Internet Retailer list of conference attendees. They started in the summer, and hit again in the fall.
There was one problem, says Love, the president of Vertical Web Media, which owns the conference: Internet Retailer doesn't let those names out of its sight.
“The list being marketed is not a legitimate list of [our] attendees,” Love says. “We do not sell, rent or reveal that list to anyone. It's our most valuable asset.”
Had the list been stolen? Apparently not.
Ian Cooper, president of new business development for EmailAppenders, says his data services firm never represented the list as the same one owned by Internet Retailer.
“We have the list because we sent one of our sales executives there,” he says. “Is there anything wrong with collecting business cards and selling the list? Who says they gave it to us? We never claimed that.”
Cooper adds that the list compiled this way contains an eyebrow-raising 6,000 names. “There were two of them who collected 600 [cards] a day,” he says.
But Love doesn't believe it. “Anybody collecting cards without a booth would be tossed out,” he says. “We have 50 staffers monitoring the show. That would have to be an intense effort — if you have a booth, you're doing really well if you get 500 cards.”
Love feels he has little recourse but to sue EmailAppenders for misrepresenting his company's list and infringing on its trademark. No such suit has yet been filed.
Welcome to the murky world of e-mail list sales and appending.
When the U.S. failed to outlaw unsolicited commercial e-mail in the Can Spam Act of 2003, it left the door open for companies specializing in selling e-mail addresses. Some are on the up-and-up. Some are not. And it's incredibly difficult to tell who's who.
E-mailAppenders attracted notice last summer when a handful of marketers claimed they'd been ripped off by the firm for small sums. The company appears to be part of a network — how tightly connected is unclear — operating under dozens of aliases.
That hasn't been easy to figure out. Anti-spam outfit Spamhaus says EmailAppenders is part of a group operated by India-based Data Champions/Sloan Marketing. The firm appears to have no physical presence in the United States.
But the ability of e-mail list vendors to find clients raises an even bigger issue.
Although permission-based marketing clearly is the best practice, a huge market apparently exists for e-mail addresses compiled by others. A Google search for “email lists” brings up 3.1 million results containing that exact phrase. A significant number have to be those of third-party compilers.
Yet buying e-mail addresses is risky, and not just for the possible loss of the money spent on them. Mailing to a purchased list can destroy a firm's e-mail reputation as well as the chances of getting all its e-mail delivered.
Spamhaus maintains a list of mailers it deems to be spammers, against which a sizable percentage of inbox providers check incoming e-mail to determine whether to block it as spam. A listing on Spamhaus can cause a marketer to have serious deliverability issues.
Moreover, e-mail inbox providers like Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft convert abandoned e-mail addresses into spam traps. A firm that hits enough of them will be dubbed a spammer — or at least a very sloppy mailer who wastefully consumes others' bandwidth by sending to garbage addresses. And it will be blocked.
Bob Richards, marketing director for Javelin Marketing, learned the hazards of third-party lists the hard way.
Richards, whose firm helps financial advisers get new clients, paid more than $14,000 to EmailAppenders for a list of 100,000 e-mail addresses. But he says 85,000 bounced when mailed, resulting in a server jam. Moreover, his e-mail service provider dumped him.
“They rightfully fired us as a client for spamming,” Richards says.
Richards demanded a refund from EmailAppenders but didn't get one, so he published a press release about his experience and complained about the vendor on RipOffReport.com. He also has registered complaints with the New York State attorney general and the Federal Trade Commission.
EmailAppenders' Cooper claims the list was fine and that Richards' inexperience as a mailer is to blame.
“There are all kinds of factors that affect e-mail deliverability,” he says. “Having a perfect list does not ensure success. This is a client who does not have internal know-how on doing large campaigns and is not willing to let us do it for him.”
He adds: “How can he send 100,000 e-mails from one server in a single day on a weekend? You have to know how to use a big list.”
Cooper also states that Richards previously had done business with EmailAppenders. “He purchased from us,” he says. “He was very happy. He came back.”
What's more, Cooper claims, EmailAppenders has 1,000 clients.
“When you have that many clients, you're going to have some unhappy customers,” he says.
But isn't Richards entitled to anything?
Cooper argues that his firm made a “valid effort” to settle but “Richards just kept wanting more and more.”
In August EmailAppenders offered Richards $10,000 to rescind his various complaints. Richards says he agreed to the deal, but as of this writing in December had yet to see a refund. Cooper contends he never received the signed document.
“Maybe his fax machine wasn't working,” Cooper says. “Why would we spend a couple of hundred dollars to draft it and not settle it?”
Richards counters that his machine registered the fax as sent.
Then there's Amy Harold, a marketing specialist with a U.S. manufacturing firm that doesn't want to be named. She paid $3,500 up front to EmailAppenders division Sales Universe, according to Cooper, for a required minimum buy.
Sales Universe was to append e-mail addresses to a file of close to 1,600 records for 60 cents a match. The cost of the job was to be applied to the $3,500 advance and the remainder banked for future work, Harold says.
But “the list they sent had 40% bad information, so they promised me half price on my next list,” she says via e-mail. And that's when the relationship went south, according to Harold.
“When I tried to use the balance, they would not let me spend it without another big purchase on top of it,” she charges. “I pointed out that it was illegal to do that, but [Sales Universe representative Kevin Daniel] didn't care. Our corporate lawyer sent him a letter explaining exactly why it was illegal (a tying arrangement that's prohibited under applicable federal and state antitrust laws), but there was no response.”
Harold then filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau of Oakland, CA.
“Two weeks later I got a call from Sales Universe's customer service (a New York City phone number),” she writes. “Kevin Daniel promised to be in touch every day until the issue was resolved. He, along with his boss Susan Jones, stayed in touch long enough to promise me the list I am due and to get my list parameters.”
That was in August. Harold heard from Sales Universe again in December after an interview with this reporter.
Where does it stand?
The Better Business Bureau, which identified the company OptInLists at 2370 Market Street in San Francisco, lists the complaint as closed. As of this writing, Harold says it has not been resolved.
Cooper says he will offer Harold a service credit on what she says his firm owes her without requiring her to spend any more money.
Scott MacAdam is another unhappy Sales Universe customer. MacAdam, the proprietor of MacAdam Magazine Marketing, signed a deal on behalf of a client under which the vendor was to append e-mail addresses to a postal file. He adds he paid in advance.
“The agreement was that for any undeliverables exceeding 20% we would get a refund,” MacAdam says. “About half of the addresses were bad. So I asked for a refund, and that started a process that was unbelievable.”
By MacAdam's calculations, Sales Universe owes him a refund just over $3,000. But sales rep Daniel was unresponsive and stopped answering his e-mails after MacAdam threatened to take the matter to his client's attorneys, MacAdam says.
However, Daniel claimed the following in an e-mail to Direct: “To reimburse MacAdam for the bad e-mails they received, we have already offered them several credit options. We did not hear from MacAdam after that on which option they would prefer.”
Rubbish, MacAdam says. He claims that he sent a string of e-mails to Daniel, including one on March 10, 2008 in which he included calculations to justify the refund he believes he is owed. Daniel did not respond, and there was no discussion of “credit options,” he continues.
Cooper says Daniel has since been fired from the company.
“Daniel was the person who caused both these issues,” he says. “We will get to the bottom of it. I'm not trying to blame the sales guy because he's gone now. We have to stand by our end of it.”
All well and good. But just who is behind EmailAppenders and Sales Universe?
According to Spamhaus' Registry of Known Spam Operations, these are two of many names used by India-based Data Champions/Sloan Marketing.
EmailAppenders lists its U.S. operations at 2753 Broadway, suite 178 in New York, a rented UPS mailbox.
Sales Universe's U.S. address is 2370 Market Street in San Francisco. Also located at that address are EventGain.com and OptInMailOnline.com, two Web sites that are — or have been — operated by Data Champions/Sloan Marketing, according to Spamhaus.
Anti-spam outfit Aspews.org lists EmailAppenders and Sales Universe as two aliases among many used by Sloan Marketing. But it doesn't mention Data Champions.
Another company possibly related to EmailAppenders is NetSalesLists.com. A man claiming to be Jeff Parker from that firm e-mailed various firms this fall, pitching business-to-business append services. But his messages contained no postal contact information. When asked, he supplied this address: 14781 Memorial Drive, Suite #1155, Houston, TX 77079.
An Internet search revealed that this address is that of the Memorial Postal Center. An employee at the center confirmed that the “suite” is a post office box.
Parker reportedly said in an e-mail to a marketing executive that NetSalesLists and EmailAppenders are “just channel partners.”
But e-mail addresses of people claiming to represent various list sellers contain striking similarities, indicating at least a technical relationship.
An e-mail from someone claiming to be Keith Kentala at Data Champions Online pitching data services came from Keith.Kentala@psmails.com.
NetSalesLists' Parker's e-mail came from JeffP@psmails4.com.
A Raymond Murphy, claiming to be from EmailAppenders, sent his messages from Ramondm@psmails9.com. A B-to-B prospecting e-mail from Andy Fischer at ListGalaxy came from Andyf@smails69.com. A prospecting message claiming to be from Lance Carter at EmailAppenders came from Lancec@smails69.com.
Is it possible that the similarities between these addresses are coincidental, and that the salespeople using them in various locations across the country are unrelated other than as channel partners? Sure, but it seems unlikely.
Cooper says he's speaking from his home in an unnamed New York City suburb, and that his company and its divisions are not trying to be difficult to reach.
“We have an 800 number which is manned 24 by seven,” he says.
When asked if EmailAppenders was headquartered Bangalore, India, Cooper says: “We have offices there, yes.” But he denied any connection to Data Champions/Sloan Marketing. “We deal with hundreds of channel partners and they're all over the place,” he says.
So where is the company based?
“I will say we're a global marketing outsourcing firm,” he says. “Anything wrong with that? I think we are based in three countries; we service clients in over 20 countries now.”
Cooper adds that his 100-plus channel partners operate under dozens of different names.
“The reason we have separate divisions is that at the end of the day, it's just like InfoUSA [now InfoGroup] has 10 different Web sites,” he adds.
Immediately after speaking with Direct, Cooper contacted Harold and MacAdam, promising to make things right. As of deadline, he hadn't. But deadline was immediately after the interview.
All the facts are not yet in. But one thing is certain: EmailAppenders and other e-mail list sellers are responding to market forces — those driven by marketers' worst instincts.
Spamhaus maintains spam traps — addresses that never signed up for everything — to catch people mailing to harvested lists.
Many marketers assert to Spamhaus that their addresses are double or confirmed opt-in — that new e-mail subscribers have responded to a confirmation message. But it's not always the case, says executive director Steve Linford: “Some mailers use confirmed opt-in only on parts of their operation and buy lists from other places and then mix the two together.”
What happens when they're informed that the list is not confirmed opt-in, or COI? They usually admit that “one of our guys did buy a new list last week, which we've decided not to use anymore.”
As Linford puts it, this means: “We're generally COI except when we're not.”
Trouble Signs
You're getting pitched on an e-mail appending deal and the price is spectacularly low, the promised match rate ridiculously high. Too good to be true?
Yes, says Austin Bliss, president of appending firm FreshAddress.
Low pricing and high promised match rates are two warning signs that an e-mail appending firm may not be legitimate.
“I saw one company claim a 35% to 85% match rate,” Bliss says. “That is preposterous.”
In fact, a 35% match rate in appending — where a data services firm matches e-mail addresses to the postal names on a marketer's house file — is probably about as high as a marketer can hope for.
As for price, Bliss says he's seen vendors offer appending deals for as little as 2 cents per name. “You can't run a business and perform a legal, legitimate service at 2 cents a name,” he adds. “Price is the best indicator of quality.”
He also recommends being wary of firms that seem to have no presence other than their Web sites.
“Have you met any of these people in person?” Bliss asks. “Have you ever heard of any of them speaking at a show? Have you ever seen them quoted in the trade press? Do you know anybody who's done business with them and will talk about it positively? Can you independently verify the company's claims?
“When I think of the companies I would recommend for any type of e-mail services, you see them at shows. They're exhibiting at conferences.”
Other signs of possible trouble: when the company's Web site doesn't provide identifiable information about its executive team; the seller's e-mail address doesn't match the company name; or the firm's messages come from a free Web-based service, such as Gmail.
“Why aren't they communicating to you from their legitimate domain?” Bliss says. — KM
Be Careful
Buying e-mail names is fraught with danger. Although the Can Spam Act doesn't outlaw unsolicited e-mail, industry best practices require permission and so do Internet service providers.
Moreover, marketers risk getting lists filled with spam traps and bad addresses, a signal to ISPs that a company is spamming. Once you get a reputation as a spammer, ISPs will block your messages from recipients' inboxes.
So exercise extreme caution when prospecting to e-mail files built by other companies.
Legitimately sourced e-mail names are expensive and rare compared with postal names, says Rick Buck, director of e-media and privacy/ISP relations for e-mail service provider e-Dialog. “So even if you can get a list to work, you typically don't have a lot of names to roll out to,” he says.
Buck's first recommendation is to hire a list broker. “There are a bunch of people out there who have been at this for years who know what's good and what's garbage,” he notes.
Buck adds it's imperative for marketers to get documentation on how permission was obtained to contact the names on behalf of other advertisers. Also, the vendor should send the messages, not the advertiser.
“If it's a legitimately sourced list, it looks more credible if [the firm that built the list] mails them and says: ‘Hey, we've got something we think you'll be interested in,” says Buck. “Another reason not to mail the list yourself is if it has a lot of bad addresses, it's your reputation that's going to take the hit.” — KM
Anti-spam outfit Aspews.org lists EmailAppenders and Sales Universe as two aliases among many used by Sloan Marketing. But it doesn't mention Data Champions.
Another company possibly related to EmailAppenders is NetSalesLists.com. A man claiming to be Jeff Parker from that firm e-mailed various firms this fall, pitching business-to-business append services. But his messages contained no postal contact information. When asked, he supplied this address: 14781 Memorial Drive, Suite #1155, Houston, TX 77079.
An Internet search revealed that this address is that of the Memorial Postal Center. An employee at the center confirmed that the “suite” is a post office box.
Parker reportedly said in an e-mail to a marketing executive that NetSalesLists and EmailAppenders are “just channel partners.”
But e-mail addresses of people claiming to represent various list sellers contain striking similarities, indicating at least a technical relationship.
An e-mail from someone claiming to be Keith Kentala at Data Champions Online pitching data services came from Keith.Kentala@psmails.com.
NetSalesLists' Parker's e-mail came from JeffP@psmails4.com.
A Raymond Murphy, claiming to be from EmailAppenders, sent his messages from Ramondm@psmails9.com. A B-to-B prospecting e-mail from Andy Fischer at ListGalaxy came from Andyf@smails69.com. A prospecting message claiming to be from Lance Carter at EmailAppenders came from Lancec@smails69.com.
Is it possible that the similarities between these addresses are coincidental, and that the salespeople using them in various locations across the country are unrelated other than as channel partners? Sure, but it seems unlikely.
Cooper says he's speaking from his home in an unnamed New York City suburb, and that his company and its divisions are not trying to be difficult to reach.
“We have an 800 number which is manned 24 by seven,” he says.
When asked if EmailAppenders was headquartered Bangalore, India, Cooper says: “We have offices there, yes.” But he denied any connection to Data Champions/Sloan Marketing. “We deal with hundreds of channel partners and they're all over the place,” he says.
So where is the company based?
“I will say we're a global marketing outsourcing firm,” he says. “Anything wrong with that? I think we are based in three countries; we service clients in over 20 countries now.”
Cooper adds that his 100-plus channel partners operate under dozens of different names.
“The reason we have separate divisions is that at the end of the day, it's just like InfoUSA [now InfoGroup] has 10 different Web sites,” he adds.
Immediately after speaking with Direct, Cooper contacted Harold and MacAdam, promising to make things right. As of deadline, he hadn't. But deadline was immediately after the interview.
All the facts are not yet in. But one thing is certain: EmailAppenders and other e-mail list sellers are responding to market forces — those driven by marketers' worst instincts.
Spamhaus maintains spam traps — addresses that never signed up for everything — to catch people mailing to harvested lists.
Many marketers assert to Spamhaus that their addresses are double or confirmed opt-in — that new e-mail subscribers have responded to a confirmation message. But it's not always the case, says executive director Steve Linford: “Some mailers use confirmed opt-in only on parts of their operation and buy lists from other places and then mix the two together.”
What happens when they're informed that the list is not confirmed opt-in, or COI? They usually admit that “one of our guys did buy a new list last week, which we've decided not to use anymore.”
As Linford puts it, this means: “We're generally COI except when we're not.”
Trouble Signs
You're getting pitched on an e-mail appending deal and the price is spectacularly low, the promised match rate ridiculously high. Too good to be true?
Yes, says Austin Bliss, president of appending firm FreshAddress.
Low pricing and high promised match rates are two warning signs that an e-mail appending firm may not be legitimate.
“I saw one company claim a 35% to 85% match rate,” Bliss says. “That is preposterous.”
In fact, a 35% match rate in appending — where a data services firm matches e-mail addresses to the postal names on a marketer's house file — is probably about as high as a marketer can hope for.
As for price, Bliss says he's seen vendors offer appending deals for as little as 2 cents per name. “You can't run a business and perform a legal, legitimate service at 2 cents a name,” he adds. “Price is the best indicator of quality.”
He also recommends being wary of firms that seem to have no presence other than their Web sites.
“Have you met any of these people in person?” Bliss asks. “Have you ever heard of any of them speaking at a show? Have you ever seen them quoted in the trade press? Do you know anybody who's done business with them and will talk about it positively? Can you independently verify the company's claims?
“When I think of the companies I would recommend for any type of e-mail services, you see them at shows. They're exhibiting at conferences.”
Other signs of possible trouble: when the company's Web site doesn't provide identifiable information about its executive team; the seller's e-mail address doesn't match the company name; or the firm's messages come from a free Web-based service, such as Gmail.
“Why aren't they communicating to you from their legitimate domain?” Bliss says. — KM
Be Careful
Buying e-mail names is fraught with danger. Although the Can Spam Act doesn't outlaw unsolicited e-mail, industry best practices require permission and so do Internet service providers.
Moreover, marketers risk getting lists filled with spam traps and bad addresses, a signal to ISPs that a company is spamming. Once you get a reputation as a spammer, ISPs will block your messages from recipients' inboxes.
So exercise extreme caution when prospecting to e-mail files built by other companies.
Legitimately sourced e-mail names are expensive and rare compared with postal names, says Rick Buck, director of e-media and privacy/ISP relations for e-mail service provider e-Dialog. “So even if you can get a list to work, you typically don't have a lot of names to roll out to,” he says.
Buck's first recommendation is to hire a list broker. “There are a bunch of people out there who have been at this for years who know what's good and what's garbage,” he notes.
Buck adds it's imperative for marketers to get documentation on how permission was obtained to contact the names on behalf of other advertisers. Also, the vendor should send the messages, not the advertiser.
“If it's a legitimately sourced list, it looks more credible if [the firm that built the list] mails them and says: ‘Hey, we've got something we think you'll be interested in,” says Buck. “Another reason not to mail the list yourself is if it has a lot of bad addresses, it's your reputation that's going to take the hit.” — KM
