Barnes & Noble: It’s Been a While! (since a Spamtrap responded…)
I bet it has been a while since a pure spamtrap (an email address that never existed) responded to Barnes & Noble’s marketing emails! That’s right — B&N is sending bulk email offers to an email address that never existed, and has been sending those emails for over a year. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a division of Experian.
The spamtrap hit could be due to any of three causes that I could think of offhand. First, a customer might have mistyped (the domain portion of) their email address when subscribing, or have deliberately entered a bogus email address, which B&N failed to confirm via an email to that email address before adding it to their list. Second, a B&N employee could have mistyped (the domain portion of) the email address when entering it into the list database. Third, B&N could possibly have purchased a list.
I don’t strongly suspect a purchased list in this case. If B&N were purchasing lists, I would expect to have seen more than a single spamtrap hit. I think that the point of failure was probably that B&N doesn’t confirm additions to its bulk email lists. Lots of companies don’t. Those companies are responsible for many annoying spams to personal email addresses that never subscribed, as well as many spamtrap hits. Companies that use bulk email to market have an obligation to clean up after themselves. Many marketers do not recognize this obligation. That results in ISPs having to manage the complaints, and end-users having to use spam filters to clean up after companies that shouldn’t have bothered them.
It also results in those of us who fight spam having to wade through the trash that these marketers leave in the mail stream to find the deliberate spam. If a company is especially careless, sometimes the spam fighters can’t distinguish between the two, and that company ends up listed in a blacklist. Does the punishment fit the crime in that case? Maybe not. But because spam is such a problem, and because the company’s carelessness makes it harder to tell deliberate spam from “mistakes”, they’re at least partly responsible for their predicament.
Think about it, B&N. And other readers — if your company does not confirm subscriptions to your lists and gets regular one-off spam complaints, think about it too, because you’re also part of the problem.
Sending IP: 8.7.42.34
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from mta992.e.bn.com (mta992.e.bn.com [8.7.42.34])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Thu, 1 Dec 2011 03:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 09:xx:xx -0000
Message-ID: <<xxx>@mta992.e.bn.com>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:rm-<xxx>@e.bn.com>
From: "Barnes & Noble" <BarnesandNobleEmail@e.bn.com>
To: <xxx>
Subject: It's Been a While! Click Today to Save 20% on Elf on the Shelf & More Kids' Gifts
MIME-Version: 1.0
Reply-To: "Barnes & Noble" <support-<xxx>@e.bn.com>
Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary="<xxx>"
Readable Email:
From: Barnes & Noble <BarnesandNobleEmail@e.bn.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: It’s Been a While! Click Today to Save 20% on Elf on the Shelf & More Kids’ Gifts
Reply-To: Barnes & Noble <support-<xxx>@e.bn.com>
We haven’t heard from you recently. Do you still want to receive great
offers and the latest book buzz via email from Barnes & Noble? Please
click on any link in this email to let us know we have your correct
email address and that you want to continue hearing from us.
<removed>
Click below to unsubscribe.
http://e.bn.com/<xxx>
(c) 2011 Barnes & Noble. All Rights Reserved.
This email is an advertisement from Barnes & Noble, Inc.
76 Ninth Avenue New York, NY 10011, Attn: Marketing Preferences
This email is part of an effort to confirm inactive recipients, as noted in the ‘please click…’ request. It may be a bit of a lighter touch than other re-confirmation efforts, but is clearly stronger than most ‘re-engagement’ campaigns without a confirmation request. I would hope other marketers will do the same with their inactives, especially during the holidays when inactives are more likely to convert. I give them props for taking the initiative during this holiday season, and in the interests of full disclosure–they are a client of mine. 🙂
You finally delurked, Ben. 🙂 Folks, Ben Isaacson is in charge of abuse and deliverability at Cheetahmail. He has emailed me privately and I knew that he was watching, but I think that this is the first time that he has commented. (The first comment by a blog account is held for moderation to discourage blog spammers. After that, we figure the poster is real and their comments are posted immediately.)
You do have a point about this particular mailing. It hit my funnybone after I’d seen mailings hitting this spamtrap for so many months, but the “We missed you” part should have gotten me to read more closely. This is in fact a re-engagement email. So I agree with you: this is an excellent idea and one that is likely to fix the very problem that I was ranting about.
However, the rant stands on its own, because B&N was just an excuse to blog about an issue that affects a great many companies that send bulk email. (Not just or mostly your customers, either.) The annoying low level of bulk email trash due to errors in data input (deliberate or accidental), combined with a failure to check for and correct those errors, fuzzes the boundary between solicited and unsolicited bulk email. That makes my work as an antispammer, and that of the researchers at blocklists/whitelists and reputation services, much more difficult.
One company (Microsoft?) recently started using the term “greymail” for this email, and for bulk email that was originally solicited but is currently unwanted and mostly ignored or filtered out by end users. I’ve seen interesting comments from marketers about greymail. Some of them seem to think that it’s just as damaging to what they do because it dilutes the experience of customers and prospective customers to receive a lot of email that they don’t want, whether it was solicited or not.
It would be wonderful if this realization leads to a better standard of practice in bulk email. A reduction the borderline spam stuff that public blacklists don’t want to list because it is sometimes solicited, but that annoys a lot of end users, would do us all some good.
Unfortunately I appear to have spoken too soon. The same spamtrap got another bulk email from B&N, this one apparently an ordinary marketing email. It doesn’t appear that B&N is doing a permission pass at all; it appears that they’re just trying to get people to respond to their emails without dropping those who do not. It’s possible that they will unsubscribe non-responsive email addresses after a time, but nothing in the current email suggests it.
And, today, January 2nd, the same spamtrap received *yet another* email acknowledging that “it has been a while” since the spamtrap responded to B&N emails (like, DUH!) and asking the spamtrap to indicate continued interest in receiving them. This was on top of a normal marketing email.
Cheetahmail, just how long does your customer plan to continue sending these emails without actually removing the email addresses that continue not to respond?