Why It’s Not A Good Idea To Send Me Spam

Somebody just sent spam to an account that I use solely for keeping records of sales. I have never, nor will I ever, give permission to anybody to send marketing stuff to that account.

One person just learned the hard way.

They thought that they would be clever and send it from a Hushmail.com account. Here’s a clue: Hushmail has a strict “no abuse” policy. If your Internet Marketing 101 course says that you can use it to send spam and get away with it, get a REAL Internet marketing course. Better yet, learn how to build a real business. Just don’t use your Hushmail email address when you order because I suspect that it’s about to be nuked.

Next, the domain name and hosting that the target website is hosted on is provided by Yahoo! Guess what? They have a system to deal with abuse, too. Bet you didn’t think about THAT, did you? Bet you didn’t think that I, a certified computer security professional, could find their abuse address in about 17 seconds, did you?

Oh, that Tommy guy is SOOOOOOOO clever!

And finally, you used a URL shrinking service that has a strict “no spam” policy. Oh, yeah, I reported you there, too, so now none of your redirected / shrinked URLs are going to work.

So let’s tally the score:

* Reported to your email provider, who has a strict no spam policy.

* Reported to your URL shrinker, who has a strict no spam policy.

* Reported to your domain name and web hosting provider, who probably won’t be too happy to hear that somebody is promoting the website via spam.

* Totally blown out of the water and unable to make even a penny off that spam run because you made the mistake of sending spam to me.

The good news is that you won’t be getting any unsubscribe requests after Hushmail shuts you down. I suggest you use the time that you would have used processing all of those unsubscribe requests (yes, you would have used that time to add those addresses to your “live address, sell to another spammer” list — admit it) to work on getting some ethics and learning how to build a business that provides true value to your customers.

Let’s hope that this person learns…