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Anti-Spam Blog Naming Names, Aiming to Shame
10/18/11
By Ken Magill
A new anti-spam blog debuted yesterday aiming to out so-called “mainsleaze” marketers—a derogatory name for well-known brands that send unsolicited email—and hopefully shame them into mending their ways.
Dubbed appropriately MainSleaze, the site is aimed at curbing unsolicited email that blacklists don’t generally tackle.
“The purpose for this blog is to create a public record of something that a lot of anti-spammers have been seeing for a while: spam sent from legitimate companies from their own IPs or from an ESP,” said long-time anti-spam researcher and MaineSleaze co-founder Catherine Jefferson. “It’s a tiny, tiny percentage of spam [overall] and ordinarily wouldn’t be worth our attention, but it is not a minuscule percentage of spam that ends up in people’s inboxes because the IPs they’re sending from tend to be trusted and the spam tends to be spam only in some cases.”
Jefferson said she believes some companies and email service providers are taking advantage of a “gray area” between criminal spamming and “big legitimate lists where people want the stuff or at least asked for it at some point.”
Pointing them out publicly may spur some email service providers to work with their clients to clean up their acts, she said.
In fact, one ESP representative told The Magill Report yesterday that a report on MainSleaze has already prompted an internal spam investigation involving the named client.
Jefferson said she has instructed her bloggers—of which there are five so far—to supply actual header and other identifiable information in their posts so people who want to act on the information, such as an ESP deliverability expert, can do so.
The site also allows comments from anyone who wants to post additional or counter information, she said.
“We’re hoping most of the ESPs will want to make use of this and what would be really cool is if we started seeing the companies [using it] which is who we’re truly after,” Jefferson said. “ESPs and companies are our main target.”
One way Jefferson and MainSleaze’s other bloggers determine if a well-known brand is spamming is if its email hits spam traps.
There are two types of spam traps: dummy addresses posted online that have never been signed up for anything and addresses that have been dormant for a long period of time.
Hitting the first type of spam trap means the sender is either harvesting email addresses or buying email names from someone who is harvesting addresses. Hitting the second type indicates the marketer exercises very poor list hygiene.
“People who get spam to their email addresses from a legitimate company via an ESP are never entirely sure whether that company might have technically got that email address legitimately,” Jefferson said. “Well, if they’re hitting my spam traps, I know they didn’t get the email address legitimately.”
Jefferson said the blog’s main weapon is negative publicity.
“If a company continues to spam, we will continue to blog about it,” she said. “If they ignore us that’s probably not wise because then it gets indexed on Google and people will look. This is an experiment and I have no idea if it will do any good.”
When asked if she was concerned about lawsuits, Jefferson said: “I thought about that. I don’t intend to behave in a way that would make a lawsuit warranted.”
Comments
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Date: 2011-11-08 03:19:23
Subject: Good idea!
If a company tries to spam, i think that people have the right to do the necessary actions to help stop companies from spamming.
Date: 2011-10-27 13:53:35
Subject: Testing Paragraph breaks
Have
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fixed
my
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yet?
Date: 2011-10-26 15:27:25
Subject: Test
Test.
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Date: 2011-10-26 13:58:17
Subject: Why the angst?
I'm not sure I understand the source of Quist's discomfiture. Catherine Jefferson clearly states what the criteria are to be mentioned in the blog, and has stuck to those policies very closely. There's no invective, just calmly related facts. In this regard, it's quite similar to a block list, just packaged in a blog instead of a DNS zone file.
And at least it gives the ESP a chance to remediate a problem sender before reputation and deliverability take a hit. From that perspective, I'm not at all surprised that legitimate ESPs are eager to engage with the blog.
Date: 2011-10-22 13:13:16
Subject: Priorities, please ...
Ken,
I want to make two points relative to this article and the activities of MainSleaze.
First, while agreeing that the misuse of consumer data remains an important concern, how we use (or misuse) that data is trumped by our inability to hold onto it. When the data that consumers entrust to us slips into the hands of someone who would do them great harm, that's a far bigger, more base level threat to consumer confidence and trust than our usage. It speaks to our ability to serve as reliable data custodians.
Second, this whole debate about 'spam' being tied to permission is wrong-headed. I'm not suggesting that one shouldn't seek definitive permission, but relevance to the consumer's preferences is the litmus test, not permission. Far too often, marketers view 'permission' as evergreen, a license to spam if you will. It's not. Permission is simply an indicator that I was interested in your content at a point in time, but you need to renew my permission with each and every subsequent mailing. And you do that by delivering content that's continually relevant to me based on my explicit preferences or those implied by my behaviors. And let's remember that my preferences extend to the frequency of your messages and the channels you use too.
So I'd argue that we should get our priorities straight. Data is the life blood of our business, but we have no God-given right to it. We need to earn the right to consumer data by demonstrating ourselves to be worthy custodians and using it consistent with consumer needs and preferences. Do some brands need to reassess their business models and practices? Yes, but not because MainSleaze (or some other self-proclaimed vigilante) sticks a 'spammer' label on them. They need to do it because their customers demand it.
Date: 2011-10-20 19:48:14
Subject: Ken I respectfully disagree
Hi Ken
I am a big fan of yours but I strongly disagree with the folks at mainsleaze and am a little surprised you are giving them airtime.
I fail to see how picking on big trusted brands will make any difference to the issue of spam or consumer confidence at all. It is just a publicity stunt and I am surprised you BS detector failed to spot it.
According to your post and I quote Catherine Jefferson [of mainsleaze] from your article. “It’s a tiny, tiny percentage of spam [overall] and ordinarily wouldn’t be worth our attention, but it is not a minuscule percentage of spam that ends up in people’s inboxes because the IPs they’re sending from tend to be trusted and the spam tends to be spam only in some cases.”
In other words not only is the problem insignificant in the overall scheme of things these brands mostly aren’t “spamming.”
As soon as I read that my mind immediately went back to a blog post of yours in February about the permission debate. Not only did you state that “the permission debate has been settled. Not to everyone’s satisfaction, but it’s been settled. No, explicit permission is not necessary. Marketers who don’t get explicit permission are playing a dangerous game, but, no, it’s simply not required. That fact may irritate some, but it is a fact”.
Which means that setting up mainsleaze to embarrass big name brands - and again I quote you directly is “akin to ladies who lunch debating over how they can change their own behavior to lower gang activity in South Central L.A”.
Can you see why I would struggle with that contradiction?
The problem with the whole spam debate is the fact that there IS no effective legal definition of spam. I have often heard it described by respected industry figures as anything the recipient of the message decides is spam. It would be like throwing a bar owner in jail for serving people who look underage! How can you run an industry on that premise?
The other problem I have is the belief that if an email you send to a dummy address or hits a spam trap, even repeatedly, is an indication of spamming while never hitting a spam trap is an indication that you are not spamming. That is simply naive
There are lots and lots of companies that will either sell you a database of known spam traps or provide list cleansing services which claim to - and largely do - identify and remove bad addresses. So here are 2 scenarios:
- I am a well-known brand that decides to harvest or buy 1 million addresses and spam them, so I either buy a database or hire someone to cleanse my list and then very carefully stagger and mingle the deployment of these cleansed addresses with my good list to stay below the radar
- I am a disgruntled person or employee with knowledge of deliverability and access to a database of spam traps who decides to “subscribe” them to your email program
See where I am going?
Big brands may be easy targets, but they are NOT the problem in fact I would go as far as to say that the majority of people fingered by mainsleaze for “spamming” will have done so by mistake - an act of omission rather than an act of commission if you like.
Looking at some of the posts I would say that they are potentially providing a platform for people with malice at heart to traduce their competitors and will not make one iota of difference to the spam problem.
Dela
Date: 2011-10-18 22:16:41
Subject: Thanks!
Appreciate the mention/story!