Won’t take names, but you should be able to guess:
Startup #1 :
Two ways to spam:
- Sends emails from different names, and different ids.
- Also sends email from the team@x.com id – which is the official mailer id.
One can block the second one, but never the first one. Why? Because you don’t know which id will be used next time they spam you!
End result : Spam.
Startup #2:
- Sends a weekly mailer, but quite lately has been using unusual names (hint:bird). The portal tries to be funny with the news item that they send, but the big deal is unsubscribe@x.com id throws following response:
The mail system
<grfultobulk@ourmail.x.com> (expanded from
<unsubscribe@x.com>): cannot update mailbox /var/mail/grfultobulk
for user grfultobulk. error writing message: File too large
Final-Recipient: rfc822; grfultobulk@ourmail.x.com
Original-Recipient: rfc822; unsubscribe@x.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.2.2
Diagnostic-Code: x-unix; input/output error.
Hmm..so the unsubscribe mail size was too large to handle?
Identify the above mentioned startups. The first 5 winners stands a chance to win z-pods (i.e. the z-version of iPod – we will ship once they are launched 
).
Aside, the point behind this post is not to demean any startups’s “marketing stunt’, but instead to discuss whether spamming strategy works or not.
I still get mails from other startups, but don’t really consider them as spam, since
- they aren’t a frequent spammer
- opting out is quite easy and
- most importantly, I find something interesting in their emails. (feature release, cool wordings etc)
What’s your opinion? Does spamming strategy works? From what I see, it can potentially piss off one’s users and is actually a ‘anti-marketing’ strategy!
How do you market then? Read some guerrilla marketing tips
here i know few: desiorkut, apanacircal, bharatstudent, and some other which are in my SPAM mail box
very bad, cheap and sick mktg tricks
siliconindia.com is the worst of the lot.
Oh yessss!! I agree with you on the anti-marketing strategy. This is my experience.
I had been receiving personal emails from lots of girls like Richa, Prerna etc etc sending me videos of college functions n the like ( with blatantly sleazy wordings). There was no unsubscribe option, so I didnt care to associate it with any of the mailing lists or networks I was part of till one day I realised all these girls had minglebox ids! And so I tried replying to those updates saying I am not an alumnus of any of those colleges, but everytime the mail bounced. Is there a way to stop this. Am reaaaalllly tired.
If they think this is smart its not, cos I had to delete my account to stop this. When I deleted my account there was a question asking why I was leaving and the team is sad to let me go. I tried explaining there too. I dont think they care losing me for their killer strategy!
@Hrishikesh – Agreed and infact, their ‘sanjana’ should get the spammer of the decade award!
@Nithya: You are very close to the prize
– the first startup is minglebox. they spam with diff names and one just can’t unsubscribe from that.
I think these are signs of desperation!
bigadda and minglebox sends weekly mails,though they are unnecessary
actually iam not sure if they can be called spams,may be their unsubscribe url is not working
is the second one techtribe ? Bird=pigeon=career pigeon ?
I would say sulekha, they don’t have proper unsubscribe option and even if unsubscribed they will send mailers again and again, although they are not startups just wanted to mention here. Sulekha definitely sucks.
ashish!! apt post, just when I was getting frustrated cos of these spams
as ‘who’ said once you subscribe to alerts from friends in Sulekha, you dont have any option to unsubscribe and they send alerts even if a friend comments in someone’s post :S how pathetic is that
then bindaspoll.com wtf is that site… see the pic below I have collected a lot of their spams see how it looks
http://img389.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bindaspollspamyu4.jpg
Even if you know the source of the spam, it works quite well to mark all regular spammers as spam in gmail. Simply because it works on Bayesian Filtering, once enough people start marking them as spam, they will go away.
Shine.com takes the cake. They send me unwanted job matches, and there’s no way to find a link that remotely sounds like unsubscribe, even after logging into shine.com