MainSleaze

5 Responses to Horse Tourneys: Inviting a Spamtrap to the Races

1. 

   tarapinn

   November 21, 2011 at 2:43 pm

   Thanks for the info. Investigating customer now.

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2. 

   bettwice2

   November 21, 2011 at 3:42 pm

   I saw your post through a Google alert. I’m the operator of HorseTourneys.com.

   Your suggestion is inaccurate. The only email addresses that have been added to our email service have been those collected with opt-in permission at on-track events at Ellis Park (a U.S. based racetrack located in Kentucky), those that have been signed up through the site’s parent program at the NHC Tour (run by the NTRA, horse racing’s trade association, which this website supports), or accounts at the site. We have not purchased a list or added emails by any other means.

   Certainly, some of the emails collected from on-track events at Ellis Park or the NTRA may have some years on them, which is likely the cause of what you report in your blog post. We always place bounced emails on the Do Not Mail list immediately after mailing, use the permission reminder and of course have instant opt-out options.

   The list is not large and is exceptionally clean.

   I’m not sure what more you should expect from a marketer, and as a responsible, licensed racetrack, we are certainly not engaging in any of the practices that you elude to in your blog post.

   Sincerely,
   McKay Smith

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   • 

     SpamBouncer

     November 21, 2011 at 3:54 pm

     I don’t see how this report could be inaccurate. The spam was sent, or I wouldn’t have had a copy to put in the report. The email address has belonged to me since 2007, although it rejected all email til sometime in mid-2009. *Somehow* that email address got on your list. I can see only the three possibilities I mentioned:

     1) Somebody typoed their email address when subscribing, and you didn’t catch it because you don’t confirm subscriptions.

     2) Old (fallow) list that has not been mailed since before 2007. (Or possibly you ignored bounces during 2007-2009.)

     3) Somebody at your company purchased a list, possibly without telling you about it.

     The first two options are consistent with what you yourself say above — a typo upon subscription, or an old email address that you either failed to contact for years or, when it bounced, ignored the bounces. In either case, you were careless and, as a result now have at least one spamtrap on your list. I’m not a gambler, but if I were I’d bet a significant sum that one known spamtrap means many that are not known.

     You need to fix this.

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     • 

       bettwice2

       November 21, 2011 at 4:45 pm

       HorseTourneys.com has only been active since August of this year. Before then, Ellis Park engaged in little to no email marketing to its collected list and probably did so with an unsophisticated email vendor or none at all (therefore, any bounces were likely not seen). The list from Ellis (which comprises a very small portion of our email list) was collected primarily between 2006-2009, and not electronically–all was done on-track. The overwhelming majority of the current list is comprised of HorseTourneys.com account holders, which are all confirmed via email prior to activating.

       Should the list from Ellis have been confirmed again? Maybe, but my overall point is that their has not been any kind of purchase involved here or any untoward methods of collection.

       In any event, I’ll take a look at the email address provided by them, but as we are putting any bounces on the Do Not Mail list, I’m not sure what else you’re suggesting. Our spam report and opt-out rates are miniscule.

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3. 

   SpamBouncer

   November 22, 2011 at 4:23 am

   Let’s clear up the last bit of your statement first. I wasn’t insisting on the purchased list; IMHO even before you responded that was not the most likely explanation of this particular single spamtrap hit. This spamtrap is an old email address, not a pure spamtrap (a spamtrap that never existed as a real email address). There are ways of managing old email addresses that will get them off of properly-run bulk email lists, but a lot of bulk email lists are not properly run. The owners of these lists are not all spammers; most are not.

   Much of the purpose of this blog is to deal with spam sent by individuals and companies who aren’t spammers — in other words, who don’t deliberately send spam. The spam still needs to be stopped, and fortunately the non-spammer senders are a lot more willing to learn from mistakes and fix the problems than spammers are. (Not surprisingly.)

   I *shuddered* when reading about Ellis Park collecting email addresses at the races. First, people who are asked for an email address under circumstances where they feel pressured to give one, or must give one to get something that they want (a free prize, whatever) commonly give false email addresses. Second, the people gathering the email addresses can make mistakes with spelling. Third, the people who enter those email addresses into a database later (especially when using handwritten lists) make mistakes.

   You make no mention of a closed-loop confirmation process for those email addresses. If there wasn’t one, the list was inevitably full of email addresses that did not actually opt-in, although I’m sure Ellis Park thought that they had. You also make no mention of tracking activity on the list or responses to it. If Ellis Park didn’t do this with their old list, and drop email addresses that didn’t open any links or respond to any email after a few months or a year, many email addresses that were valid in 2006 and 2007 are inevitably not valid today because of address churn. Some of those inevitably are spamtraps. It looks likely that one of them is my spamtrap.

   Fortunately there are ways to fix this. In this case, I’d simply retire the original Ellis Park list. It really isn’t even worth reconfirming a list as old as that and as poorly gathered. And from what you tell me, that’s not a significant part of your current list.

   From what you tell me, accounts on your site are confirmed “by email”, which I take it means a full closed-loop confirmed opt-in (or “double opt-in”), right? If so, then you’re doing your own list right. So dropping the small number of earlier account holders (perhaps after sending them a last email asking them to open an account on HorseTourneys.com if they want to remain on the list) would fix this problem and likely a number of other spamtrap hits as well.

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