E-mail Appending Plot Thickens

Another marketer has surfaced claiming to have been ripped off by an e-mail appending company and there’s evidence the firm is related to EmailAppenders, which is in a dispute with another U.S. firm and possibly related to or operated by the same India-based spamming operation.

Two recent articles published here— one detailing a dispute where Javelin Marketing claimed it lost $14,000 on a garbage list from EmailAppenders, and another showing that EmailAppenders U.S. operations may be nothing more than a rented UPS box in New York City—prompted Scott MacAdam, proprietor of MacAdam Magazine Marketing, to e-mail this newsletter to tell of a similar deal gone bad with a firm calling itself Sales Universe.

Could it be the same or a related company to the firm that operates EmailAppenders? he asked.

Indeed, it could.

According to MacAdam, he signed a deal on behalf of a client under which Sales Universe was to append e-mail addresses to the client’s postal file.

He added he paid upfront.

“The agreement was that for any undeliverables exceeding 20%, we would get a refund,” said MacAdam. “About half of the addresses were bad. So I asked for a refund, and that started a process that was unbelievable.”

By MacAdam’s calculations, Sales Universe owes him a refund just over $3,000. He added his representative at Sales Universe, Kevin Daniel, was unresponsive and stopped answering his e-mails completely after he threatened to take the matter to his client’s attorneys.

However, in an e-mail exchange with this newsletter, Daniel claimed: “To reimburse MacAdam for the bad e-mails they received, we have already offered them several credit options. We did not hear from MacAdam after that on which option they would prefer.”

MacAdam, however, forwarded this newsletter a short string of e-mails in which on March 10 he sent his calculations to justify the refund he believes he is owed. According to MacAdam, Daniel did not respond. Also according to MacAdam, there was no discussion of “credit options.”

On May 15, according to the e-mail string MacAdam supplied this newsletter, he sent a message to Daniel urging him to acknowledge he received it, to which Daniel responded simply: “Hi Scott, Got your mail.” MacAdam responded to that message by urging Daniel to tell him what to do next quickly because the matter was about to be turned over to attorneys.

That is when all communication from Daniel stopped, according to MacAdam.

MacAdam also said when he began researching Sales Universe online, he was unable to get a reliable physical address for the firm. He claims that at one point Sales Universe gave its location as Freemont, CA, but then switched its address to San Francisco.

“I just kept running into a blank wall,” he said.

He added that he finally gave up on getting the refund, in part because his client’s attorneys said it would cost more to go after Sales Universe than it would to simply let the matter drop.

Meanwhile, there is evidence that Sales Universe may be part of a network of firms operated by Data Champions/Sloan Marketing, which according to anti-spam outfit Spamhaus, is an India-based spamming operation that also operates EmailAppenders.

As of this writing, SalesUniverse.com lists its U.S. operations at 425 Market Street, suite 2200 in San Francisco. The address is home to The Regus Group, an office-space subletting outfit.

According to Jane Ponce, operations manager for the Regus Group, there has never been a company called Sales Universe at Regus.