Mailings from FashionShopping.com – continued

Remember our posting about FashionShopping.com? Well we see in the logs a change of behaviour regarding the mailings of FashionShopping.com.

Last time it was a lot of trouble getting of that list and they send their mailings too many times. To give you an idea: we intercepted emails from FashionShopping on a daily base since april until yesterday, May 8th. 80% of the emails where sent to the same recipients meaning that you could have received their mailing on a daily base for more than two weeks if MX Lab didn’t block them accordingly.

These guys send now from a new domain emailing-direct.org. As always a quick visit to a site gives us an ‘under construction’ web site.

The first paragraph under the many images seems to have an unsubscribe link: “Vous avez été invité, mais conformement à la loi sur la confiance dans l’économie numérique, si vous ne souhaitez plus recevoir des propositions par email de la part de Emailing-Direct pour le compte de FashionShopping.com veuillez cliquer sur le lien suivant : Désinscription”.

However think link gives us the error “Unsubscribe links do not work inside a preview message. In order to test unsubscribe links you will need to do a campaign” on the website http://www.my-login.net/z_oocode_129168_oocode_z.php. A visit to the root of this site gives us a login to an control panel of Expedite Simplicity, email & mobile marketing software.

The second paragraph: “We support responsible and ethical email marketing practices. Please know that we respect your right to be purged from this marketing campaign. Removal from this email distribution list is automatically enforced by our email delivery system. Please click here to start the process for email deletion”.

This will lead us to http://emailing-direct.org/index.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/*************.aspx and yes, here we have an unsubscribe form. You can even contact them at “Emailing Direct - 66, Avenue Des Champs Elysées - Paris, FR 75008 FR. So, they have moved from mailing house EmailVision to this company. Did EmailVision received too many complaints?

A WHOIS search on Netsol for emailing-direct.org gives us some results. The domain is registered to Emailing Direct in Paris, France. The registrant contact email address is admin@emailing-direct.com. When visiting their site we get a nice web site.

A short contact with this ‘company’ learns us that you can get mailings for a minimum fee of € 500. This includes sending out 500.000 emails at € 0,001 per message in a fully managed campaign.

It is clear that pushing your email based campaigns to the limit isn’t always a good thing. Some general tips when you are into email marketing:

• send from an authorised source, don’t spoof your from address,
• use your own address, no Gmail or others please, so that subscribers can view the source and can contact you directly
• make sure that your message has unsubscribe links that work and that remove an email address of the list immediatly
• send your campaign weekly, monthly,… which is much more accepted by your audience
• create your content with care (do not only include images but combine with text)