Last week I have received mailings from FashionShopping.com to two email addresses on my other domain pixeldesign.be. The first thing I noticed was that these email addresses wheren’t in use anymore. One of them was only being used as a default system reply address from webforms on one of my servers. When a site visitor doesn’t fill in his or her email address this default address was used to avoid processing errors. The other one was a temporary emailaddress that I created for a project. This indicates that their process of getting email addresses isn’t really a good one.

This mailing was send 3 times on a row with an interval of approx a day. Two days later I get a new mailing from FashionShopping.com. When browsing through the global logs at  MX Lab, I see a smiliar behaviour towards other domains. This is quite an anoying behaviour if you ask me.

Intriged by this case I examine the HTML source and unsubscribe link. I decided to take action to see what will happen. The unsubscribe request is followed by a confirmation. So far so good.

To take it even to a higher level, I submitted the campaign as an abuse case to  the company EmailVision that performs the service for FashionShopping.com as an abuse case. They seems a genuine company to me based on the high quality web site they have.

The mailing was sent too often and according to Belgian laws this company has no opt-in confirmation from me to use the email addresses they target. Not that the Belgian law will be respected by foreign marketing campaigns but okay.

Case closed I thought, I got an unsubscribe confirmation on my screen and stated my complaint.

Until yesterday I receive a new mailing from FashionShopping.com. And today another one. I’m not the only one who is receiving the same over and over again, clients at MX Lab receive the same mailing again.

What is different? Their sending email address is now invitation@fashionshopping.onlineresponse.net. The domain onlineresponse.net has no web site so this is a dummy domain they use to avoid filters based on the senders details. Why else would you change your sending address? If you send out mailings you make sure that you have a sending address that  you keep so that recipients can whitelist it to avoid interception by their spam filters. No?

You can see this kind of tricks a lot by so-called “email marketing” companies that keeps on sending the same mailing each time from a different domain. By doing this they still can keep on mailing you because your unsubscribe request was for a different campaign/domain. The unsubscribe in this case is still handled by the same company so we give it the benefit of the doubt. 

The Emailvision web site states “Emailvision only supports permission-based marketing practices. Since our inception in 1999 and before any anti-spam legislation had been introduced, Emailvision has always had a zero spam tolerance policy.” and furthermore “ If you believe you may have received an unsolicited commercial email from Emailvision on behalf of any of our clients, please click here to fill out the form including full details of the “from address” or sender of the email. Emailvision thoroughly investigates any complaint. If the email address of the complainant is known, it will be immediately unsubscribed from the relevant client mailing list.“

Okay, I have made my conclusions.