Email Marketing or Spam?
I’m sure you’ve noticed ads offering cheap “email marketing” that promise to “reach hundreds of thousands of potential new customers.”
These ads are usually found in your SPAM box, but you can also find them in many top places. I even saw an ad on a popular video channel for “email marketing.” This is just a fancy term for bot-generated SPAM, but the people selling this service interpreted it as a legitimate way to promote their business. How legit can it be for a bot to send out millions of SPAM messages that get lost between “performance improvement” ads and “you won a foreign lottery” scams?
The “email marketing” video ad I saw featured well-dressed people shaking hands after a business meeting as if they had just outlined a detailed marketing plan. The reality of these businesses is that they are simply spammers who harvest or buy email addresses harvested from hackers and then run programs on them that will send the same message to each of them.
This type of behavior is illegal or in the gray area of being illegal, which is why many of these businesses are located in counties that have few laws governing this type of behavior. Many of them will have an address that says they are from the US, but these are usually just fake addresses created to make you feel better about their ethics due to spam laws in the US.
Part of sending spam is using “proxies” or different Internet addresses so that spam filters have a harder time filtering out the massive amounts of messages that are sent to email addresses. For most of these companies, making fake addresses and business facades is just part of the day job.
Before you consider buying an “email marketing” campaign, think about whether you really want your business name to appear in every SPAM box next to fake lottery messages, and whether you really want to give people associated with sending spam and hacking so much information about your company.
