Email Blast, Spam or Phishing?
Almost every day I receive an email that appears to be a legitimate communication from a company. On many occasions it takes parts of a second to realize that I have been spammed once again.
Some people call it Email Blast when they decide to “Spam” potential clients or leads. I will to confess at what time I use to scan for email addresses of people that would potentially be interested in posting their jobs opportunities on our job board.
One of the main reasons the job board no longer exists is because we where going after people who where not interested in us. At the moment I would ask myself what am I doing wrong. I remember I would do research and try to engage people in a personal manner not just sending a generic email to everyone and still they where not interested. My approach was similar to cold calling via email (we all know how inneffective cold calling is).
Yesterday I was sent an email from a so called E-Marketing firm (which I am guessing is more like an Email Spamming company). As soon as I saw the email a red flag went up since the link you needed to click opened a huge questionnaire.
Having an IT security background this brings many questions since the questionnaire looked more like a complicated tax return than the simple business registration they where offering. Why would anyone want to share that type of information with a complete stranger?
As you see on the left this is just one of the 7 questions that where asked ( I attempted to take a screenshot but it was not possible).
Feel free to review the survey at your own risk.
I wonder why this company is asking for so much information from strangers. To me it seems to be more like a phishing scam than a real business registry. Very similar to some of the scams I spoke about days ago in “They have an offer you can’t refuse“.
During the next few days I will be doing research and writing on the CIMA IT Solutions corporate blog (My Company) on correct and healthy ways to approach Email Distribution.
Before I wrote this post I decided to contact the person emailing me and asked him where did he get my email from.
His reply indicated that “I might be a prospect for them” but did not have answer where he got my email address. I emailed him to remove me from the list. A few minutes later he replied asking me if I played golf. At that moment I threw the towel in and decided to write this post since I clearly saw he did not get the message.
How do you deal with all these companies using an Business-To-Business Spamming method?
What do you think of the method of this company is Is it Email Blast, Spam or Phishing?
Would you like to share your experiences on handling these type of situations?
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Photo Credit by uoɹɐɐ