Boy, there is one busy post-office box in Houston and there is evidence the companies using it are related to EmailAppenders—an India-based firm which evidence suggests has no physical presence in the U.S., and which has been accused by multiple marketers of ripping them off in bad e-mail deals.
At least four e-mail appending and list-sales firms are claiming or have claimed the Houston P.O. box as their U.S. headquarters.
For example, a Magilla Marketing reader last week received a prospecting e-mail from a woman calling herself Michelle Davies at SixChannels.com offering business and consumer e-mail lists for sale.
When the reader asked Davies for a physical postal address, he began to receive e-mail from a woman calling herself Michelle Clark, who supplied 14781 Memorial Drive, Suite1155, Houston, TX.
Magilla Marketing has verified the address is that of the Memorial Postal Center in Houston and the “suite” is a post office box.
Meanwhile, another Magilla Marketing reader last week was in contact with a firm passing itself off as ListOrbitMail.com.
ListOrbitMail.com does not offer a street address. However, a search for ListOrbitMail on Google brings up a series of press releases in which the company gives its address as 14781 Memorial Drive, Suite 1155 in Houston. A firm calling itself simply ListOrbit also claims the Memorial Drive address.
When it was pointed out to Clark that SixChannels claimed the same address as ListOrbit, she responded: “I heard about them. They have a (sic) office neighboring ours.”
Last December, an employee at Penton Media—Magilla Marketing’s publisher—received a prospecting e-mail from a man calling himself Jeff Parker at NetSalesLists.com. He gave his address as 14781 Memorial Drive, Suite 1155 in Houston.
At the same time Parker was communicating with a Penton Media employee, he was prospecting a Magilla Marketing reader. When the reader asked if NetSalesLists was related to EmailAppenders, Parker said NetSalesLists and EmailAppenders were “just channel partners.”
The NetSalesLists.com Web site no longer loads.
A company calling itself SalesBrowser.com has also claimed the 14781 Memorial Drive address. That company’s site also no longer loads, either.
According to anti-spam outfit Spamhaus’ ROKSO list, or Register of Known Spam Operations, an India-based firm called Sloan Marketing/Data Champions operates or has operated EmailAppenders.com, EmailAppenders.net, ListOrbitOnline.com, SalesBrowser.com, SalesBrowser.net and SixChannelsMail.com.
EmailAppenders recently seemingly disappeared after failing to defend itself in a lawsuit brought against it by Internet Retailer. The publisher claimed EmailAppenders was hawking a bogus list of attendees to its annual conference.
EmailAppenders—which until recently was doing business using the URL EmailAppendersWeb.com, a site that no longer loads— reappeared on April 29 using the URL eAppendersWeb.com.
When the site first appeared, it referred to the company in its header and in body copy as EmailAppenders. Within a week, though, almost all references to EmailAppenders had been altered to refer to the firm as eAppendersWeb.com.
However, they missed one. As reader Mark Vogel pointed out in the comments section after last week’s story about EmailAppenders transformation to eAppendersWeb.com, clicking on the “blog” link at the bottom of eAppendersWeb.com’s home page still brings up EmailAppenders’ Weblog.
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