OT: infonow-opt-in.com

[Matt Kettler]

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Michele Neylon:: Blacknight.ie wrote:
> Has anybody heard of or had any experience of infonow-opt-in.com ?

I have no experience with them, but that domain is registered using
domainsbyproxy.com as an anonymizer. (do a whois on the domain)

While that's not an outright black mark, lots of well-known spammers and shady
outfits use  whois anonymizers to cover up that they own a domain.

In general if a marketing company can't put their actual address in their whois
registration, I'd question their legitimacy.

Also look at their website. No address, anywhere. Just an email form and an 888
phone number. That's very unusual. Most companies put their postal mailing
address on their website.

Clearly this company doesn't want you to know where their mailing address is.
The big question is why. Are they covering up that they're a part of a
well-known spam organization, or are they a legit company which is privacy paranoid.

Also, look at their IP address.
$host www.infonow-opt-in.com
www.infonow-opt-in.com has address 66.235.202.105

That IP is owned by iPowerWeb.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/search?hl=en&group=news.admin.net-abuse.email&q=iPowerWeb&qt_g=1&searchnow=Search+this+group

There's plenty of accusation that iPowerWeb assists spammers.

> They say they are compliant with "Can Spam", but we're Irish, so I'm
> paranoid

can-spam compliance doesn't mean they aren't spammers. It just means they aren't
breaking a rather weak law.

Look at their site. They claim that their lists are 100% opt-in. I say bullshit.

No human in their right mind ever willingly agrees to accept email marketing
from arbitrary companies. EVER.

It's one thing for a person to opt-in to get marketing info from one specific
company, I do that all the time. However I don't know of anybody who will opt-in
to get marketing email in the general sense.

Anyone who is going to offer to provide opt-in email addresses for you is very
likely to be lying. There's no such thing as a group of people who want to get
non-specific marketing mail. At best they "opted in" as a part of some buried
legalese in a click-through agreement while registering for some completely
unrelated site.

Unless YOU generate your own marketing list, the email addresses are almost
certainly going to be unwilling recipients. They might have agreed to having
their address used without realizing it, but they're still don't want the mail,
and will view the mail as spam.

While I can't say for certain this company is illegitimate, I'd say there's a
lot of questions to ask of this company before you use them.

1) Find out the postal mailing address of their office. Search and see if it
matches any known spam outfits. If they're unwilling to identify their office
location, don't do business with them, as they're probably hiding that
information to avoid legal complaints.

2) Find out exactly where they get their lists from. Clearly there's no "sign up
here" on their website, so where do these willing recipients sign up at?

3) Find out exactly where customers remove themselves from the database if they
no longer want to receive mail. I noticed no "remove" link on their main page.

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