Ouch: A List-Purchase Nightmare

Bob Richards claims he’s been ripped off.

He recently paid a little more than $14,000 to have New York-based EmailAppenders for a purportedly permission-based list of over 100,000 e-mail addresses.

But when he mailed the names, 85,000 bounced, resulting in a server jam-up, said Richards, the marketing director of Javelin Marketing. And his company was fired as a client by its e-mail service provider.

For its part, EmailAppenders is claiming that the file was fine and that it was probably Richards’ inexperience with large e-mail campaigns that caused the failure.

Richards wants a refund. EmailAppenders isn’t paying.

So Richards decided to go public. He recently published a press release detailing his complaint about EmailAppenders and likening many data sellers to drug pushers.

“Drug users go to the pusher for their drug and the pushers keep the streets plentiful with drugs,” said the release. “Similarly, marketers go to list services for their drug and many of these list services sell tainted goods. And it’s these list services that fuel the spread of spam.”

He has also posted a complaint about EmailAppenders on RipOffReport.com. Richards said he has also reported EmailAppenders to the New York State Attorney General and the Federal Trade Commission.

According to Richards, EmailAppenders in June delivered a list of 135,000 addresses purported to be those of financial advisors, his company’s target audience.

When he received the list, he said, it was immediately apparent that 5,000 or 6,000 records were off target, so he deleted them by hand.

Once the list was whittled down to about 118,000 addresses, “it still fell within the parameters I had set,” he said, so he paid for it and went ahead with a weekend mailing.

When Richards reported to work on Monday, he said, his e-mail box was filled with 85,000 bounces, and the company’s server was locked up.

“I had to delete my e-mail box just to free up our server,” he said.

Then, according to Richards, his e-mail service provider Swiftpage terminated Javelin Marketing’s account.

“They rightfully fired us as a client for spamming,” he said.

Dan Ogdon, marketing director for Swiftpage, confirmed the company terminated Javelin’s account for spamming.

“We do that all the time,” he said. “We’ve got a full-time staff dedicated to making sure our clients don’t spam.”

Ogdon added that Swiftpage—an e-mail marketing software-on-demand provider to small businesses—has a system in place that raises red flags whenever a mailing sent by one of its clients shows a high percentage of bounces and when a client mails to a large number of new addresses. To Swiftpage, these are signs of spamming.

Ogdon said Javelin’s campaign triggered at least the too-many-new-addresses warning on Swiftpage’s system. As a result, he said, he has no idea of the quality of the file EmailAppenders supplied to Javelin.

“Our policy is you must have explicit permission,” Ogdon said. “That’s not Can Spam, but it is our policy.”

Ian Cooper, president of new business development for EmailAppenders, said there are many possible reasons besides list quality that may have jammed up Javelin’s e-mail campaign.

“There are all kinds of factors that affect e-mail deliverability,” he said. “Having a perfect list does not ensure success.”

He added: “This is a client who does not have internal know-how on doing large campaigns and is not willing to let us do it for him.”

He also said that when his company mailed the same list, more than 78,000 messages reached their mark.

Cooper added that this was the second project EmailAppenders did for Javelin. “The first was a much smaller project of around 10,000 addresses and they were very happy with it. It went very well, so they came back,” he said.

He said he has offered to do a permission mailing to the list on Javelin’s behalf and provide a refund for all the hard bounces.

However, Cooper said, he hesitates to give Javelin a full refund because Javelin has taken possession of the list and there’s no way to undo that action.

“In the digital world, you’ve already got the goods,” he said. “It’s like someone buying an ad and then saying: ‘I didn’t get any business; I want my money back.’”

EmailAppenders claims its e-mail addresses are all permission based and verified by phone and e-mail multiple times per year.

“We want our clients to succeed,” Cooper said.

In an e-mail to Richards obtained by this newsletter, Cooper offered a $10,000 refund if Richards would rescind his complaints from the FTC and RipOffReport, among other things.

As of deadline, Richards said he would accept the offer if EmailAppenders removes all the hard and soft bounces and non-financial advisors from the list it supplied, and upon subsequently mailing it, Javelin gets a 90% or better delivery rate.