jbm blog

Bad experiences with James Moore & Associates

A few days ago I received some spam advertising contract iPhone developers from James Moore. Obviously I get a lot of spam, and unusually this one slipped past the filters. It was pretty clear from the format and tone that the recruiter (yes, it was from one of them) had harvested addresses indiscriminately and was either doing at Outlook bcc blast, or using some other primitive email tool.

I am not morally opposed to spam; it’s become a reality of modern life that just won’t go away. Like most people, I’ve learned to live with it. While some may argue that it harms a companies’ reputation, I find it’s largely background noise. I do, however, want a way to get off the list. My spam filters do a good job with the enhancement offers but they’re less good at dealing with rare topics like contract iPhone developers in Elbonia.

I’m usually in the habit of clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link on spam that gets past the spam filters and was sent from companies that are not obviously scam artists. In doing so, I’m sending them a message. At ClickTracks we did a fair amount of email marketing and I was always concerned about the unsubscribe rate. Once ClickTracks was acquired by Lyris, I really started to understand issues like list management, CANSPAM and basic best practices. If I think a spammer is otherwise basically OK, I do them a favor and tell them to stop. They hopefully use this data to make better decisions.

The spam from James Moore, however, did not have any unsubscribe link. Of course that’s predictable, given the way it was sent. My only option was to click reply and get them to stop. James Moore claims to be leading Silicon Valley company so the fact they don’t have an unsubscribe link, that they use their regular mail server and that they harvest email addresses so openly makes them pretty bad, in my opinion, so I clicked reply with the one line:

don’t email me again. Spamming is no way to win friends and influence people. You should be ashamed

When I was foolish enough to use batch-and-blast methods from my desktop, I certainly got plenty of justifiable abuse from the people I was spamming. I always apologized and removed them from the list (Excel->delete row, in my case) and took it on the chin. It’s life as a spammer.

Imagine my amazement when this came back:

I thought I was doing them a favor by even replying. Certainly when I used to do batch-and-blast I treated the ranting replies as a guide to how good my message was. List unsubscribes are a guide to quality.

I couldn’t believe that anyone would be so dumb as the fuel the fire. I’m the victim of the spam, for goodness sake! I’m doing you a favor by pointing out that it’s spam. Of course that was my mistake - these people are too dumb to understand that they should be using email list management software so they get data about unsubscribe rates, and so they look less spammy. They also need to train their staff that if you’re going to spam people, you’re going to piss them off. Imagine if you pick up the phone and cold-call someone. When they answer and realize it’s just some dumb pitch and hang up, you don’t then call them back and tell them it’s rude to hang up on someone.

Good grief. Idiots. Just idiots.

Now back to what I should have done in the first place: blacklist their mail server IP so none of their emails, spammy or not, get through.