The trick works in analog too. Just stuff the pre-paid business reply mail with other junk mail.
That’s a classic. http://bash.org/?127039 I do occasionally wonder if it would still work, but most business reply mail type spam has been supplanted by email nowadays.
A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
171–180 of 231 posts
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, for the email industry (both marketers and client developers) "Spam" is used to specify emails that are not compliant with the CAN-SPAM act - they don't have a way to unsubscribe or report abuse. ITT people are using Spam to cover all sorts of junk email, but in my mind there is a difference between companies engaging in annoying methods to get your consent and organizations engaging in bad faith breaches of CAN-…
I’m not sure if your comment is meant to defend the practices of the companies I’m referring to - maybe you work at one of these spam houses, I won’t judge - but frankly, I don’t care what the definition of CAN-SPAM is. Clearly everyone thinks they CAN-SPAM me and I’ve never heard of anyone actually being fined under any anti-spam law except at the highest, most absurdly industrial volumes of spam. If my email is pub…
In most of my professional career (B2B), we didn't use any scraped data in our marketing system. We relied strictly on opt-in forms or in-person event data (some gray areas existed here).
However, you've unwittingly touched on one of the philosophical divisions that exist in most organizations between Marketing and Sales: Sales departments in general have a much more "liberal" idea of who is email-able. The idea being, "what's the rule against me just emailing someone about something"?
Well, you give a mouse a cookie and before you know it Sales has an entire email automation system to themselves. So if you look at an expensive sales tool like Outreach or Salesloft and ask, "what's the difference between this and a normal email automation tool" the answer is a lot of money and a lot of looking the other way.
So to give you a window into the politics of a GTM organization, most companies keep kind of a curtain of plausible deniability between their "inbound"/optin-based marketing and their outbound sales systems.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#173I used to get spam from a Chinese exporter who conveniently included their actual address in the emails. One day I happened to be visiting their city and went to their office and asked them to unsubscribe me in person. The lady was very confused and first thought I wanted to buy something. I showed her the spam on my phone and she agreed but didn't bother actually removing me. Just seemed to think I was a bit stupid…
There's no better motivater than having an upset customer in your presence. I have camped outside the office of someone until a situation was resolved.
Most of the issues get resolved like this if they are not used to such things constantly by many people, in which case you may need an organised crowd of people with similar issue gathering for one thing. Perhaps that is called a protest.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, for the email industry (both marketers and client developers) "Spam" is used to specify emails that are not compliant with the CAN-SPAM act - they don't have a way to unsubscribe or report abuse. ITT people are using Spam to cover all sorts of junk email, but in my mind there is a difference between companies engaging in annoying methods to get your consent and organizations engaging in bad faith breaches of CAN-…
There's not a big difference between skirting the rules of CAN-SPAM with annoying junk emails and email list sales to whoever will pay and violating it outright. There's a pretty clear line between useful work and scummy opportunism which is crossed constantly by "legitimate" email marketing.
List purchases are a whole thing in the industry. It's actually a big line to cross. But it's far from a universal behavior that organizations deal in.
So I will say I have witnessed some amount of "grey market" lists (Tech Target, Experts Exchange, etc). But in my professional opinion, all these seem to do is generate garbage leads and unsubscribes.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#175I run marketing email databases. This is cute, but it doesn't actually do anything in most systems - either the employees all already get the marketing emails or there is a system-wide rule to suppress against the email domain. If you actually want to (potentially) break something, try submitting some obscure characters or malformed html into some fields. Blank spaces in emails can particularly be a nuisance. And if…
I think Log4shell was about the closest we got to this. It’s still crazy to me you could exploit an unknown machine by leaving a string of text somewhere and waiting for a vulnerable client to process it. I imagine many spammers are running a lot of insecure PHP and Perl scripts to support their operation. That was certainly the case back in ~2006, and I imagine most “new entrant” spammers are not using email but rat…
Reminds me of leaving “+++” in bbs posts. This the the AT “hangup” command and would often cause the reader’s modem to disconnect from the internet.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#176The design of this blog is delightfully readable: no popups, no banners, no FOUC as I wait for a beautiful webfont to load.
That is because it is a plain text, so it does not have those problems. My opinion is that plain text is good idea.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#177I run marketing email databases. This is cute, but it doesn't actually do anything in most systems - either the employees all already get the marketing emails or there is a system-wide rule to suppress against the email domain. If you actually want to (potentially) break something, try submitting some obscure characters or malformed html into some fields. Blank spaces in emails can particularly be a nuisance. And if…
How do you sleep at night?
Not all email marketing is bad - most of it isn't, really. 90% of stuff you likely subscribed to at some point for whatever reason (Free gift, discount, purchase, interested in their content, whatever) - and most things have an unsubscribe so it's a simple matter to remove yourself.
Most of the other 10% goes to spam anyway and I never see it. Apart from the obvious spam that I never see anyway, I very rarely get emails that I didn't intend to receive.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#178Why is "Get X Free" on someone's website bad? If you don't want it, then exit. Just because they have an offer available for those who subscribe doesn't immediately mean they're going to be a bad user of your email.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no better motivater than having an upset customer in your presence. I have camped outside the office of someone until a situation was resolved.
Most of the issues get resolved like this if they are not used to such things constantly by many people, in which case you may need an organised crowd of people with similar issue gathering for one thing. Perhaps that is called a protest.
Atlassian Statuspage used to set tracking cookies on their customer status pages. Of course me as a single customer asking to remove the tracking cookies had minimal if any effect. So I crawled a list of Atlassian Statuspage customers, contacted them asking to also open support tickets. And indeed it worked, the tracking cookies got removed :-)
My writeup about this "project": https://blog.healthchecks.io/2020/09/about-tracking-cookies-...
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no better motivater than having an upset customer in your presence. I have camped outside the office of someone until a situation was resolved.
Agreed. Great motivator. Slightly different twist is if you have kids - rambunctious kids are even better. We had an issue with a home renovation project that was not completed (we had stupidly paid the final invoice on time, lesson learned- always hold back 10% until you’re 100% satisfied) My wife got pissed at their lack of response. She took our two boys to their office, sat down, and instructed them to feel free…
Hahaha ! My dad did mostly the same thing with his home builder. Except he went to their exhibition stand at some local event. He just stood calmly there, talking with every potential customer coming in to share his story with the company in front of the boss, who was in the stand. They tried to get the security to take him out but since he paid to enter, that he was calm and stayed nice, they did nothing.
Eventually, he got what he wanted to get : some 30k€ of construction work that weren’t estimated up front and that they tried to make him pay once back to the wall. And as a plus, the company’s boss took directly the management of the project.