On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Avi Freedman wrote:
Very sorry this happened. Marketing purchased a 'trial version' of a list that apparently had ARIN-gleanings. Use of that list has been suspended with all partners, and we are working on ways to make sure that we can 'pattern match' any such similar crud from future lists. This is the first of the lists that has been a problem (though we have in the past had one or two salespeople who were quickly unconfused on individual solicitations), and we intend to make sure it won't happen again.
If anyone has any heuristics for ensuring that lists don't have automated new-domain or SWIP gleanings, I'd appreciate them; for now we'll just search for hostmaster@, ipspace@, and other role-looking accounts.
We should probably take this off-list but I want to make one important point. By definition, you can't buy an opt-in list. If you buy it, and use it, you're spamming. You've always seemed to me to be an intelligent fellow, and you should be able to figure out why my assertion is, in fact, true. If you're not sure, I'll be happy to impart additional clue in your direction but it will be offlist, since this is NANOG and not SPAM-L. And if you need any tools with which to pass on said clue to Marketing, feel free to accept my offer of help (but again, I think you're a pretty smart guy and you should be able to thwack Marketing a couple times with the cluebat on your own). Hope this helps; have a great day, and good luck educating The Droids. -- JustThe.net LLC - Steve "Web Dude" Sobol, CTO - sjsobol@JustThe.net Donate a portion of your monthly ISP bill to your favorite charity or non-profit organization! E-mail me for details.