Yet another e-mail list-sales firm has surfaced that appears to be related to the same India-based outfit that operated EmailAppenders, a company that has been accused by multiple marketers of ripping them off.
This new firm is going by the name Optin Consulting.
A reader who wished not to be named here received an e-mail last week from someone calling herself Ashley Clarke, an online marketing executive with OptinBuilders.
This is not the first time OptinBuilders has appeared in this newsletter. Last February, Brian Clotworthy, executive vice president of construction-trade publication list-management firm The Information Refinery, claimed OptinBuilders approached him trying to sell him data from lists his firm manages exclusively—therefore, lists OptinBuilders couldn’t legitimately offer.
Clarke’s message to the reader last week asked to schedule a conference call to discuss a possible list deal.
The sender’s e-mail address was [email protected]. E-mail addresses that don’t match the company’s name are a warning sign the company may not be legitimate, or at least that it can’t send messages from its domain because it may have been identified by anti-spam blocklists as a spammer.
After the recipient of Clarke’s message expressed interest in buying lists, someone calling himself Mark Adler took over the conversation. In the e-mail string obtained by this newsletter, it appears that Clarke forwarded the exchange to Adler at [email protected].
Adler then began communicating with the reader from [email protected].
When asked for his firm’s name, physical postal address and Web site address, Adler responded with: “Optin Consulting, OptinConsulting.com, 5715 Will Clayton, Suite #1756, Humble, TX 77338.”
The 5715 Will Clayton address is the same as that which was once claimed by OptinBuilders on its Web site which no longer loads. The address has also been claimed by SixChannels, though its Web site no longer lists an address for its headquarters.
As a result, it appears Optin Consulting is another in a long string of aliases used by India-based Data Champions/Sloan Marketing, the firm apparently behind EmailAppenders.
According to anti-spam blocklisting site Spamhaus, Data Champions/Sloan Marketing operates or has operated from dozens of domains, including OptinBuilders.com, OptinBuilders.biz, SixChannels.com, EmailAppenders.com and EmailAppenders.net.
Also according to Spamhaus, use of lists purchased from these firms has damaged the e-mail reputations of many businesses.
“Use of data (lists) purchased from Data Champions has hurt the reputations of many small businesses which [are] ignorant of the bad practices and outright fraud so common in the mailing biz,” says copy on Spamhaus’s listing of Data Champions.
And besides The Information Refinery’s Clotworthy, other marketers have accused firms apparently operated by Data Champions of misrepresenting their lists, as well.
In March, a man representing himself as Jack Wilson from OptinList sent e-mails to exhibitors at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s HIMSS 2009 convention claiming to offer the entire HIMSS list of 9,500 names for sale with e-mail addresses.
However, according to Karen Malone, vice president, meeting services, OptInList was not an authorized representative of HIMSS and couldn’t possibly have a real list of its conference attendees.
In an interview with this newsletter, Wilson confirmed his outfit’s address was 2370 Market Street in San Francisco, the same address as that claimed by EventGain, another company that according to Spamhaus, is run by Data Champions.
In August, an Illinois court ordered EmailAppenders to pay Internet Retailer attorneys fees in a suit the trade publisher filed alleging the controversial data-sales firm wrongly claimed to have a list of Internet Retailer’s annual conference attendees for sale.
However, it is seemingly unlikely that Internet Retailer will see a dime of the award.
EmailAppenders failed to show up in court to defend itself against Internet Retailer’s suit.
EmailAppenders also seemingly disappeared in April and then reappeared in May as eAppendersWeb with a new Web site, but with references to EmailAppenders throughout.
eAppendersWeb was subsequently scrubbed of references to EmailAppenders, but not before the references could be documented here.
eAppendersWeb shortly thereafter disappeared, as well.
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