A columnist with USA Today took a swipe at 21st Century’s new e-mail appending service yesterday, citing a source who claimed the product is “straight from the slime pit.”
David Schwartz, president of Farmingdale, NY-based 21st Century Marketing called the column “fallacious, pernicious and spurious.” He has plans to contact the newspaper and request a retraction.
Elizabeth Weise, who reported on and wrote the column, contended that epend conducts dictionary spamming via common Internet service providers to append e-mail address to business address. She said the technique is frequently used by spammers who compile large files of last names and then match those names to specific Internet domains such as usatoday.com to “create lists of Net users to annoy.” She did not state where spammers generate the initial file of last names.
Schwartz, speaking while on vacation in Florida yesterday, said the company’s conduct is ethical. He said epend identifies e-mail postal address patterns at specific company Web sites and applies those patterns to customer names at business address. The names are provided by list owners who have a pre-existing relationship with those customers, an acceptable method of e-mail contact, he said.
The process produces a match rate of 20% to 40%, Schwartz said. 21st then e-mails those customers asking them to opt in if they wish to receive further e-mail from the list owner. The names of those who agree are then released to the list owner for a fee.
Weise went on in her column to infer that a match rate of 20% to 40%, meant that the remaining names were sent unwanted e-mail.
“At first glance, the 21st Century plan might not seem so bad,” she wrote. “After all, they’re asking for permission. And it is fine for the people who say yes. But what about the other 60% to 80%, who either aren’t the right [email protected] or who deliberately didn’t give an e-mail address to the store at the mall because they didn’t want to get e-mail from the store?”
Schwartz refuted this claim. “She [Weise] assumed that we were spamming and e-mailing the other 60% to 80% when in fact they are not even contacted by us,” he said.
Schwartz added that Weise misrepresented herself as a prospect to a salesperson on the phone. The service was unveiled last month at the Direct Marketing Association’s convention in Toronto.
“It’s an unfortunate situation in which a reporter has not spent enough time, energy and research and has totally misconceived what we do,” Schwartz said.
Weise quoted Jason Catlett of Junkbusters as saying the product is “straight from the slime pit.”
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