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McAfee’s Threat Predictions for 2012 include the prediction that you’ll get more spam your inbox due to legitimate companies purchasing lists through “shady but legal means”.
"3. More spam in your inbox — The new trend in spamming is sending emails from advertising companies that obtain their email lists through shady but legal means. They may buy the lists from companies that are going out of business or partner with other advertising entities or mail-list providers without taking into account privacy policies.
They can do this because under the U.S.’ CAN-SPAM Act advertisers are not required to receive consent before sending advertising. Since this method is cheaper and less risky than bombarding us with spam from networks of compromised computers, we expect this activity to continue to grow through 2012, possibly resulting in more spam in your inbox."
From: http://blogs.mcafee.com/consumer/2012-mcafee-threat-predictions-consumers
While some legitimate companies are purchasing lists through shady but legal means, the assumption that these emails will end up in the inbox does not necessarily follow.
One example of a shady means of purchasing a list is a practice called “email appending” or “epending”. This can occur when a business has a name and a physical address for a person but doesn’t have the person’s email address. So they pay a third party to do data matching to try and find the person’s email address.
I lot of legitimate businesses will argue that this is not shady, because they do have a relationship with the person. However, there at least two major issues with this practice.
First, if the person did not give the company their email address, then they have not given the company permission to email them. When people have not given a business explicit permission to send them email, they often express their displeasure at receiving the messages by hitting the spam button, which increases the complaint rate for that legitimate business.
Any business, even legitimate businesses, which have high complaint rates on their messages, are likely to have their messages moved to the spam or junk folder, instead of the inbox.
Secondly, companies that do epending, often do it wrong. They’ll match up addresses that belong to completely unrelated people, or they’ll match up email addresses that haven’t been used in years and hit inactive account spamtraps.
When a legitimate business suddenly starts to hit spamtraps in high volume, it’s pretty obvious that there is something wrong with their email addresses acquisition and email list hygiene practices.
McAfee also calls into question the practice of emailing to a list when one company acquires another company. When a legitimate business acquires another legitimate business and the acquired company has a list of email addresses that they send to regularly, then yes, the acquiring company should be allowed to send email to that list of email addresses.
However, to prevent an increase in spam complaints the acquiring company should follow a couple of best practices:
- Make sure the messages from the new company include the branding of the old company, so that people can easily remember that they have given permission to receive the messages.
- Make it easy for people to communicate that they do not want to get emails from the new company. It should be easier than clicking on the spam button. The best way to do this is to ask people to confirm they want to receive email from the new company. An alternative approach, which is still ok but not as effective at reducing complaints, is to let people click a link saying that they don’t want to receive the emails. Either link should be near the top of email and easy to find.