J.C. Penney: Last Day! Deals! Deals! For a Spamtrap, no Less….
J.C. Penney, a major U.S.-based department store, is sending bulk email to an email address that, when live, was assigned to a role account rather than a real person. This email address did not send email and never subscribed to receive email. J. C. Penney may accept unconfirmed web form subscriptions (guaranteeing typos and bogus subscriptions), or may have purchased a list. The ESP is Cheetahmail, a division of Experian.
Sending IP: 66.165.105.19
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from mta152.jcpenneyem.com (mta152.jcpenneyem.com [66.165.105.19])
by <xxx> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <xxx>
for <xxx>; Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:xx:xx -0600 (CST)
DKIM-Signature: <xxx>
DomainKey-Signature: <xxx>
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:xx:xx -0000
Message-ID: <<xxx>@mta152.jcpenneyem.com>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:rm-<xxx>e@jcpenneyem.com>
From: "jcpenney" <jcpenney-support@jcpenneyem.com>
To: <xxx>
Subject: Last Day! 1000s Of Deals, Up To $20 Off + Free Ship To Store
MIME-Version: 1.0
Reply-To: "jcpenney" <support-<xxx>@jcpenneyem.com>
Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary="<xxx>"
Readable Email:
From: jcpenney <jcpenney-support@jcpenneyem.com>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Last Day! 1000s Of Deals, Up To $20 Off + Free Ship To Store
Reply-To: jcpenney <support-<xxx>@jcpenneyem.com>
It’s the last day to shop 1000s of deals, like 40-60% off coats for everyone. The deals don’t stop there: up to an extra $20 off plus ship free to store.
Shop now.
http://jcpenneyem.com/a/<xxx>
<spamtrap> subscribed to promotional emails from jcpenney. To keep these emails coming, add jcpenney-support@jcpenneyem.com to your address book now. To unsubscribe from such emails or update your email preference, click below:
http://jcpenneyem.com/<xxx>
Please allow 7-10 days for your request to be processed.
(C) 2011 J.C. Penney Company, Inc. and/or JCP Media Inc.,
6501 Legacy Drive, Plano, Texas, United States of America.
All rights reserved. To contact customer service, please call 1-800-222-6161.
Today J. C. Penney emailed the same spamtrap again, with an email that has this Subject header:
Subject: <e-pended name deleted>, Confirm Your Email Now — And We’ll Keep The Deals Coming!
The email contains two images with alternate text urging the user to reconfirm. I didn’t retrieve either image because the link was heavily tagged and doing so would obviously be taken to show reconfirmation of the email address.
Unfortunately, nowhere in any text in the email did it tell the recipient that failure to reconfirm would mean that the email address would be dropped from the list. Instead, the footer contains the usual opt-out link, with a note that opt outs take 7 to 10 days to process. :/ Since I said this yesterday in another blog at length, I will keep it brief — opt-out “reconfirmations” do NOT constitute valid permission passes. A valid permission pass is opt-in.
Pingback: J.C. Penney: Phony “Confirmed” Opt-In (Gotcha!) » MainSleaze
I can’t speak for this client (although I am investigating), but would like to comment on the general point here.
The primary goal of marketers who run these campaigns is to understand whether the many thousands (and perhaps hundreds or even millions) of those who don’t regularly open or click on emails are worth emailing anymore. These efforts are not designed to find the ‘spamtrap in the haystack’, or ‘list wash’.
For arguments sake; what is a confirmation but an affirmative click associated with an email?
Method 1; Click through to a specific email request to confirm with no other content
Method 2; Click through to a specific email request to confirm with incentives provided
Method 3; Click on any link in an opt-out welcome (or other) email
Method 4; Click ‘display images’ (or the like feature) to render the pixel tag in an email
[Granted, there may be some (but likely few) email users or software that still render pixels by default.]
I completely agree that methods 1 & 2 are optimal and are a true ‘confirmation’. However, in the marketing world; the goal is to gauge interest, relevance, and determine whether to continue sending emails to otherwise inactive or possibly mistaken emails. There is a good argument that a click-through or user who goes through the trouble of opening images in what should be a very clear commercial email (even with images off) indicates interest and activity.
Since most senders still operate in the world of single opt-in, then efforts to mix the Methods and find the creative happy-medium to confirm recipients should be encouraged for all senders, and not ridiculed or considered ‘deceptive’. Some marketers may start with Method 4 and move thereafter to a true confirmation before suppression (which I expect to be the case here). The fact that this very large sender is making an effort, as opposed to most who make no effort, should be considered as a positive trend. If you read the email marketing industry content these days, you’ll quickly find that such re-engagement, relevancy , and suppression efforts are praised, which I hope translates to these readers too. We have to start somewhere, right?