Last week, while I was wandering from link to link in the Internet, I found a site for opt-in mail marketing. The site was about list building and internet marketing strategies claiming they would tech advanced techniques to advanced marketers. I opened a spare e-mail account from my web server. I always do this because it is easier to open an e-mail account than changing your old mail address and also to see the impact of giving my e-mail address to another online marketer. I use a unique e-mail address for every submission so that I can find out what that particular marketer does with my e-mail. I saw all kinds of marketers and their tricks but this one was different. He was a real monster.

Two days later I was receiving mails about prescription drugs “from the US”, how to build my abs and other parts of my body, how to lose weight, how to gain weight, how a distant relative died and left me millions of dollars, how to live longer with detox diets, how to make money sitting on my back and all the other subjects a very imaginative person can think of. And unbelievably, it took only two days. Curiosity may have killed the cat but I’m not a regular cat. So I decided to find out what was happening.

I generated a new e-mail address with a different domain, went back to the site and found a communication form. In the form I wrote that I was not interested in the information on the site but I would be happy to receive the e-mail list the owner of the site built. Half an hour later he fell to my trap; and he sent me an e-mail about his own online marketing business. On this mail he was telling me how successful a businessman he was and how he had mail lists for different niches and so on. A mail list with 5000 mail addresses of people interested in a certain niche was $150; an extensive list with 25,000 mail addresses was $500. I wonder how many clients he has.

I wrote him back telling I was interested in the extensive list asking about his other services and company web site. After receiving the information I was after I saw that he was not living in the US and I had no way of suing for spamming and other crimes. So much time, so much energy; of course it was not wasted. I used all my knowledge and experience, found most of his domains and registration e-mails, and harvested all the e-mails on his sites.

Now it was time for pay back and a list building lesson. I wrote a mail about how online marketing should be and how decent people behave on the Internet and mailed it to all of the mail addresses he used from an anonymous server with a fake sender address. Waited for one day and forwarded all of the accumulated spam messages in my mailboxes to all of his addresses. I also registered all of the addresses to the opt-in forms of spammers I know, he himself included. I suppose he is still doing the same things tainting the names of real online marketers however revenge is sweet served cold or hot.

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Category: Marketing
Keywords: List Building