Spam Reports

The Dangers of Buying E-Mail Lists

The story of Javelin Marketing and the troubles it encountered

By George Craciun, Security News Editor

25th of July 2008, 15:12 GMT

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What can result from purchasing e-mail lists

Bob Richard, the marketing director of Javelin Marketing, a California based company that specializes in selling promotional material, has recently revealed to the general public that the organization he works for wasted $14,000 on an e-mail address list. It was purchased from Emailappenders and seemed to be genuine, but after about 100.000 messages had been sent out, a staggering 85% of them "bounced back" and put so much strain on the servers that important messages could not get through.

Javelin Marketing relies on e-mail messages in order to attract new customers and, for that reason, they have their own database. But managing such a database takes considerable amount of time and effort, so you can see why one would be tempted to purchase a list of people that want to receive informative messages and have for this specific reason given out their e-mail.

Bob Richards had never done such a thing before, so he approached the offer from Emailappenders with caution. Since the previously mentioned company also provided a list of customers, Richards took the time to contact them and see if they were content with the database they had purchased. Since none had anything bad to say about Emailappenders, he paid $14,000 for a list of 135,000 e-mail addresses. At that time, Richards believed it was a good deal, even if just 67,500 of them would yield a positive result.

The database was then handed over to SwiftPage, a company very similar to FedEx or DHL, just that instead of delivering regular mail, it delivers electronic mail. After sending out about 100,000 messages, it was noticed that a staggering 85% of them were redirected back to Javelin Marketing's servers.

"It actually clogged our e-mail server. There were so many bounces coming back so quickly, other mail couldn't get through," says Richards as cited by NetworkLand. Since SwiftPage is very careful about its activities and does not want to be blacklisted or related to spam, it has dropped Javelin Marketing as a client.

This is what Richards has to say about the incident: "I kind of learned my lesson. I 'm convinced that the only way to do it [compile an e-mail list] is ... you've got to do it the hard way and develop all of the mechanisms necessary to have people opt in to your own sites".

TAGS:

spam | Javelin Marketing | security

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