I'm a bit late to the discussion, but I've seen cases where a legitimate domain name will expire and be converted to a spam trap within a week. Then the original domain owner will renew it before it goes back to the registry, and it will point back to its pre-expiry MX records.
In the worst examples I've seen, the domain went from a legitimate mail server to a trap network in the same day, with no time for bounces in between. List cleaning can certainly be used by unscrupulous marketers, and I'm opposed to that use of it. On the other hand, what should we tell a good marketer who is sending to confirmed, engaged addresses that have converted into traps overnight? ________________________________ From: mailop <mailop-boun...@mailop.org> on behalf of Brett Schenker <bhschen...@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, March 7, 2018 11:41:55 AM To: Aaron C. de Bruyn via mailop Subject: Re: [mailop] Hat color of list washers / validators I work in the nonprofit/political space and while I can see uses to make sure offline email list building (think people on a corner asking you to sign up/sign a petition) has had the addresses typed in correctly, list washing/validating is unfortunately being used by more orgs and campaigns as a way to scrub their list instead of spending time and looking at engagement instead. They think it'll get rid of spam traps and they can keep sending to the unengaged portion of their list. The habit seems to be driven by consultants in the space but I also know there's a lot of these services that have approached me offering kickbacks, I mean affiliate status so that we can profit off of the use. It's a hard uphill battle against this. On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 12:20 PM, Steve Atkins <st...@blighty.com<mailto:st...@blighty.com>> wrote: > >> Also, if I'm not mistaking, list-validation services are mainly targeting >> online businesses, so even if the there might be legit cases, I doubt the >> biggest part of their revenues is. > > I'm not really familiar with their revenue model but I do know that for > some of them, spammers and rogue marketers absolutely do not make up the > majority of their client base, if at all. They don't describe themselves that way, for sure. But the business model is to take lists of email addresses of variable quality, then to wash those lists through a validation service, then send to them through an ESP. The only value of the validation service here is to hide the quality and provenance of the list from the ESP. It doesn't change anything else. That's typically behaviour from a marketer who doesn't think the ESP would continue to work with them if they saw the quality of their lists. Cheers, Steve _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org<mailto:mailop@mailop.org> https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop -- Brett Schenker Man of Many Things, Including 5B Consulting - http://www.5bconsulting.com Graphic Policy - http://www.graphicpolicy.com Twitter - http://twitter.com/bhschenker LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/in/brettschenker
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