MainSleaze

Computing and technical books publisher O’Reilly Media, an old favorite of mine from whom I recently purchased several books directly, just sent a bulk email advertisement to the tagged email address that I provided them during the purchase. This email address has never been used except for that purpose. The ESP is iPost, a company that I had not heard of previously.

The spam email contained the following sentence in the footer:

You are receiving this message because you purchased directly from O’Reilly or registered titles.

In other words, because you purchased from us or registered purchases with us, we are sending you bulk email advertisements that you did not ask for til you tell us to stop. If O’Reilly’s goal had been to loose customers, they could scarcely have improved upon this. :/

I’m frankly horrified. I’ve been a fan and follower of Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, on Twitter since shortly after I joined the service. I have been purchasing O’Reilly books since the 1980s, when I was a college student struggling to understand the old Unix minicomputer at school and write a thesis using the vi editor and nroff text processing program. O’Reilly has been around for long enough to know better than to pull a stunt like this! I suspect that they hired a marketing manager or an outside agency, trusted them to know their business, and didn’t supervise what they were doing nearly well enough.

Unfortunately, you can’t trust marketing professionals to know how to do email marketing without spamming. This is shameful, since they’ve been doing it for a decade now, but it’s true. I already blogged about another company that had spammed me, not just once after one purchase, but continually reset my preferences every time I bought something from them: Godiva.

The attitude shown by the Godiva marketing representative that responded to that blog was typical. Godiva can get away with that attitude; they lost an occasional customer (me) but have plenty of others who don’t care or want the email. O’Reilly’s customers are a less accepting sort when it comes to spam. O’Reilly needs to stop this nonsense immediately.

Sending IP: 204.94.81.84

Spam Sample:

Actual Headers:

Received: from pip84.smf.ipost.com (pip84.smf.ipost.com [204.94.81.84])
	by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
	for <xxx>; Wed, 12 Sep 2012 18:xx:xx -0000 (UT)
Received: by pip84.smf.ipost.com (PowerMTA(TM) v3.5r14) id <xxx> 
        for <xxx>; Wed, 12 Sep 2012 11:xx:xx -0700 
        (envelope-from <errors+<xxx>@post.oreilly.com>)
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
From: "O'Reilly Media" <oreilly@post.oreilly.com>
To: <xxx>
Subject: Welcome Catherine, Your exclusive offers: Get $4.99 Ebook Upgrades
 and much more
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 11:xx:xx -0700
Message-Id: <<xxx>@post.oreilly.com>
Errors-To: errors+<xxx>@post.oreilly.com
List-Post: NO (posting not allowed on this list)
List-Unsubscribe: <http://post.oreilly.com/prefs/<xxx>>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=<xxx>

Readable Email:

From: O’Reilly Media <oreilly@post.oreilly.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Welcome Catherine, Your exclusive offers: Get $4.99 Ebook Upgrades and much more

Hello Catherine, Welcome to O’Reilly.

We’re delighted that you chose to purchase directly from O’Reilly, and we want to make sure you know about our exclusive offers available to registered members of oreilly.com.

<removed>

You are receiving this message because you purchased directly from O’Reilly or registered titles. Keep up on all things O’Reilly by signing up for our email alerts and newsletters:

http://post.oreilly.com/rd/<xxx>

To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add oreilly@post.oreilly.com to your address book.

To unsubscribe from all email announcements from O’Reilly, click here:

http://post.oreilly.com/rd/<xxx>

O’Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 (707) 827-7000