We all get spam. It's one of the daily chores of being online, and thanks to the brilliance of spamfiltering software, some 2000 of the spams that try to reach me daily get neatly blocked. But a few get through, and at rare moments I get to find out the sources of them. One such moment was today – and the culprit appears to be a firm called Mailtonic, probably based in Switzerland, though proving to be a tad elusive. As a consumer it’s usually a mystery how our email addresses are illegally harvested, I’m curious to find out more about these guys and wondered if anyone had a poor experience of working with them? One firm who mailed me appears to have bought the list in good faith and had their fingers burned badly - as the MD said: “Nice website at the time, they looked legit …but since then we’ve found many people saying they didn’t give permission for their addresses to be used”.
In the UK there’s a dead cert way to avoid the risks. The Direct Marketing Association includes every leading data warehouse, and on top of the firms being compliant with the UK data protection legislation, there’s an extra layer of the industry’s own code. Their code covers the way that lists are sold to companies looking for direct marketing leads, and if there is a dispute they have a transparent independent mechanism for investigating.
Look for list rental firms that follow industry codes at www.DMA.org.uk | Companies can report list rental firms not living up to their promise at www.DMCommission.com
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