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Comment RSSEmail Marketers: Competitors Adding Spam Traps?
Written by Pace LattinSeptember 20, 2012 # 11:11 am # Expert Guides, Specials # 2 Comments
Seems that there is a growing issue with more and more people being victim of Spam Traps, specific emails created or added by people in order to try to “catch” email marketers. Sometimes its attorneys looking for a quick way to make money, sometimes its actually a competitor trying to hurt another company. For whatever reason, email marketers are having trouble keeping these people off their lists. If you are to believe the rumors by his detractors, even Dan Balsam, famed spam-attorney ads himself to lists in order to make money.
On that note, I would like to introduce you to James Carner with Quickie Marketing, Inc. They have an advanced list hygiene system that allows anyone to scrub files by themselves 24/7. They are “the” private investigator of spam advisories and for the last year, James has collected more than 1 million spam advisory IP’s of blackhole/blacklist threats worldwide that he uses to block. In example, so far in their investigation they found 665 spamhaus IPs and growing weekly.
One unique thing about Quickie is that they have published their advisory findings online: http://www.quickiemarketing.com/spam-advisory in which one can get detailed information about each advisory and a domain to block.
Another unique thing about Quickie is they actually report the traps they find by giving you the trap and naming it. In example, you would get a csv list of traps that looks like this:
name@domain.com, spamhaus
name2@domain2.com, barracuda
Their Standard Scrub matches and removes:
Against 6.5 mm HAMY traps & litigators
Against 60 mm protestors
Against 100 mm hard bounces
Against 1 mm spam advisory IPs
Checks mx records for a domain
Verifies Reverse DNS
Performs open relay checks
Judges response time performance
Validates working website
Is parked or sends us other warnings
Keep an eye on these guys. I heard a rumor that they recently hired a CEO and are making some big changes which will turn a lot of heads. I spoke to James and he says they have around 60 clients paying them on a monthly subscription and their prices compete directly against their competition with $250 per million with no contracts. Here’s their brochure if you’re interested.
Email them at: info@quickiemarketing.com
Or call Todd McQuillin (sales) directly for details: 541-480-6301
As a note, this is NOT a paid endorsement or advertisement.
Written by Pace Lattin
Pace Lattin is one of the top experts in interactive advertising, affiliate marketing. Pace Lattin is known for his dedication to ethics in marketing, and focus on compliance and fraud in the industry, and has written numerous articles for publications from MediaPost, ClickZ, ADOTAS and his own blogs.
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Hmm.. I am hoping you are not advocating ways to help people send more UCE without being caught?
There is a reason these Spam traps and lists are needed.
Attorneys hooking themselves up just to make money is surely despicable. But equally despicable are the insane amounts of uninvited Spam or UCE invading our servers every day. Directly from product owners or from bad seed “affiliates”.
As someone that traps/blocks email/blog/forum/link spammers every day, sees a steady stream of this junk, and run several types of block-lists, I can tell you that the amount of bandwidth and money WASTED on handling such invalid junk is enormous.
What supposedly gives people the right to invade servers they never paid for with Email/Forum/blog/link spam, and similar? To email addresses and sites that NEVER signed up to neither receive nor handle this junk? A very large number of them sent to email addresses that was NEVER real and as such could only have been scraped off the Internet (the spam traps). In our case, purely invented (randomly generated) addresses that could never have been valid on any email-list.
FYI. We have now added a new way of handling it.
Rather than just playing with the people sending the various types of junk, the Spam Beneficiaries (the final product-owners and/or sites that would benefit from junk) are published.
They Spam destinations and keywords used are published (without real links that could benefit in SEO), so people can see who NOT to buy from.
The added benefit is that when people search for them in the SEs, they in quite a few cases end up getting outranked by spam reports even on their own names, making it really visible to the public, which web-sites and businesses uses Spam or Spam links to promote themselves. Where to stay away from.
Much more effective over time to make the beneficiaries of Spam known to the world, rather than hunting the behind the scenes systems, senders, or “affiliates” that send it out. Fixing the root-cause; that UCE still has profit attached to it.
When this takes on, Affiliates/Promoters using UCE will quickly get very unpopular with the product-owners they promote using such methods.
DeeCee recently posted..Does a Proxy/VPN make you safe on the Internet?
Absolute bullshit that I deliberately add myself to lists to make money. Every time someone has accused me of this and produce a purported opt-in record, I’ve been able to prove it’s fake.
Seriously, Pace, was it really necessary to reference me in this article?