In a recent email newsletter I told the story of someone who kept emailing me when I’d asked them to stop. Well, it’s happened again, by another company. I got three emails recently with the subject line of “Specialist Legal Profession Marketing”. Perhaps you got one too?
The reason I got three emails is that they emailed me personally, guides@ and sales@.
I'm on those two group email addresses so got the email three times. The reason I got so angry this time and called up the list owner and chewed them out, is that :-
- I had told them before to remove the group email addresses
- That they tried to tell me that the email addresses in the list were "permission only" email addresses. Now bear in mind no single person uses these email address NO-ONE would have given permission to use the email addresses. The only place they could have come from is by being "scraped*" off the website.
Turns out that the company had been sending out the wrong list AFTER I'd asked to be removed. I guess everyone has a numpty in their business somewhere.
* "Scraping" off a website means sending a software crawler to the site that looks for anything with an @ sign in it and storing it in a database then using data cleaning routines to work out the email addresses and sell those as lists. It's the reason why we have some clever code in our Staff Directory module that allows email addresses to be clicked on by people on our clients' websites, but not harvested by these crawlers.