Find The Boots

I was reading my gmail and noticed an adsense ad that asked Are you on an Email Blacklist? So I clicked it and came to a page that offers to check your email address against several lists to see if you've been marked as a spammer.

I can see how this is a useful service. I once worked for a medium sized company where the marketing department sent out a newsletter. It was completely opt-in and only addressed to people under support. But it had mostly government clients on the list, and evidently one of them automatically marked it as spam and put the organization on a black list for spammers. Within a few weeks, the entire company of 200 people were having difficulty getting their email delivered. It was a major hassle to track down and resolve.

So I checked out this service. What information do you think they need in order to check to see if you're on the lists? Email address only, right? Well, they'd also like your name, job title, company, country, and zip code.

Nice try guys. I suspect what they're really looking for is nicely cleansed mailing lists of contacts at companies that are concerned about their marketing communications being sidetracked.

There is no free lunch.