I get a fair bit of spam email. I'm one of those folks with a number of email addresses listed in the various NIC databases because I have some domain names registered, and this has been a popular harvesting ground for spammers for many years now. I hate spam, and I consider it my civic duty to hurt every spammer I encounter as much as I can, in the sense that I want them off the 'net ASAP before they can cause more nuisance. I am sworn to make spamming as expensive and inconvenient for spammers as possible.

Usually spammers are cowardly and unethical curs that hide behind as much false information as possible, attempting to make it difficult for rabid spam-haters like me to track them down and have their 'net acess revoked. In fact, it's unusual to receive a spam email with legitimate return addresses and contact information: spammers that do this are just asking to be mailbombed, or at least have their inbox flooded with complaints. I therefore tend to treat "legitimate" junk mail a little differently to the usual spam: I send them a curt response telling them what I think of spam and how I have added their mailserver to my site blacklist.

I recently received a spam email from a company that was in all sincerity trying to advertise some service or other, and they didn't hide behind any falsehoods. They claimed to have received my email address from a certain marketsharerecovery.com with assurances that I had purchased something over the Internet and "opted in" to receive marketing information. In actual fact, I don't even have a credit card, and the notion of being sent advertising via email causes me to foam at the mouth and make compulsive neck-wringing gestures.

The company who sent me the email has apologised sufficiently that I've removed them from my email blacklist, although they remain on my personal "never engage in business dealings with this company" list. I'm pretty forgiving in the former issue, but hard to appease in the latter. The company that they sourced my address from, however, merits further investigation.

In essence, they buy spam lists off companies and then on-sell them, but they assure you the people have opted in to receive such advertising. They also say that "any time a database changes hands, you will get a few spam complaints", only they say it in ALL CAPS. Well believe me, if you send me spam, you'll get a spam complaint! I have emphatically not agreed to let anyone send me junk email! How do these people know that they are buying legitimate lists of people who have opted in (silly people!) to receive junk mail? How do they know they're not just buying out lists of email addresses from spammers who are cashing in on their only asset?

Judging by the fact that they got my email address, they don't. To me they just look like another spamhaus like the shonky twits that try to sell me email lists (by spamming me) and then falsify 90% of the information in the email in a weak attempt to make it hard for me to retaliate. The main differences are that they're not advertising using spam themselves, and they have a nicely-dressed web page.

Ultimately, though, they still sell email addresses of people who will blacklist your mailserver and your company if you send them junk mail. I don't see that this is a good business proposition, and I hope people find out how bad their product is very rapidly. I bid marketsharerecovery.com die and go to dot-com-hell soon, and that there be nobody interested in buying their assets -- a list of email addresses -- when they liquidate.

-- Addendum --

I sent a query to the company that spammed me originally to ask them if the list had been of any use, or whether I was a representative sample of the kind of response they got. I received a remarkably prompt reply, requesting confidentiality (understandably), which essentially said that the list was useless (putting it nicely), and after a string of bad experiences with angry recipients and bad addresses (plus, admittedly, a few positive responses), they had decided that the best course of action was to "purge this list into oblivion". They emphasise that they will never again purchase or use a third party list unless they can verify where the opt-in information has come from.

Apparently marketsharerecovery.com also told them a lie to the effect that the email addresses in question are pinged at least once a month to give the recipients a chance to be removed and to validate the address. This is clearly false: the list contained many bad addresses, and I had never heard of marketsharerecovery.com prior to this incident.