Annalivia Ford

I stumbled across this website in an IRC channel, and went to look at it. It´s wonderful! It opens with a sentence that is so stunningly giggle-inducingly gorgeous that I must repeat it here: SORBS is a new organization that’s run exclusively by the Spamhaus organization. Where SpamHaus is primarily a European based organization, SORBS is an American based organization and it is quickly rising to become one of the most effective American blacklisting agencies in the world. O RLY?! I wonder how I missed that announcement...

Clicking around some more, I find a page that purports to sell a comprehensive list of "Abusive Complaining Email Addresses", which is a list I'd bet I'm on given how very little spam my former work address gets even after nearly 10 years. "Even though your (as long as your in compliance with the Federal Can Spam Act) completely legal in doing this, they completely and utterly flip out. They will actually take the time to report you to your domain registrar, your hosting company and your hosting companies upstream provider. There are relentless and a lack of a better world: JERKS for doing so."

OMG I'M SUCH A JERK.


There are some other things that amused me about this site. Apparently they don't want their incredibly valuable content to be copied (maybe they know that the only reason that would happen is for the sake of mockery?) but haha! my No-Script defeated their puny attempt at using Javascript to prevent copying and here I am, being a JERK and quoting their page directly.

The insane content, lack of copy-editing, lazy use of obvious stock photos, and some hilarious typos (We Will Reply To You Shorty) Hey!!I'm not short! made me think it was a parody, but no! The site is apparently run by Joshua Greenwood, ROKSO'd spammer, so desperate for hosting for his pathetic scams that he's gone off to Russia to get it.

The really sad part is that he will probably make some money from this. People are endlessly gullible, and always looking for the shortcut to problems that have no shortcut. There's no silver bullet for finding spam-traps in mailing lists, other than collecting the data correctly the first time, and even then sometimes things can go wrong: A company I know of narrowly avoided a major mess because they'd sent email to a guy that had provided his email address to them during a marketing phone call. They sent him marketing email regularly and about 9 months later he reported them, apparently having forgotten the original interaction. Innocent mistake on his part, no wrong-doing on the part of the company, but even so it was a near thing.

My readers are no doubt the choir that I am preaching to, but perhaps y'all can go forth and disabuse any folks you know that are new to the email marketing game of the idea that there is anything easy about it, and teach them about the evils of list purchasing and the seething masses of con-artists out there who are sooooooo anxious to Help Them Send Email Successfully - for a reasonable fee, of course.