They Ignored a Blacklist Warning From IT—Until 3 Domains Were Blocked and Marketing Had to Move
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There’s only so many times you can warn someone about the same problem before you have to let them learn the hard way.
One IT technician found himself in that position after a client hired an outside company to send large amounts of sales emails.
The tech team warned everyone that using regular email accounts for that would get them blocked, but the company insisted they knew what they were doing.
Sure enough, the first account was restricted within 24 hours. Yet rather than change course, they asked for another and then another.
By the third round of blocked accounts, the IT company finally refused to keep playing along and warned that the client’s entire domain could end up blacklisted.
Read on to see what happened next.
The one where a marketing company would rather get their customer’s domain blacklisted than learn to use SendGrid
I feel like I’m losing my mind.
A client of the MSP I work at recently contracted an external marketing AI-driven personalized email sales generation firm.
They send bulk template emails to a list of potential customers and try to convince them to buy something. But they’re not marketing and will correct you every time you so much as insinuate they are. Whatever. Not the issue I have with them.
They received the first security alert within 24 hours.
Rather than send mail from their own infrastructure or a dedicated bulk sending service, they apparently require a standard licensed user mailbox to send spam-generated personalized sales leads.
We warn them that this won’t fly, that account is going to get blocked within 24 hours, and that the client runs the risk of having their entire domain blacklisted.
Marketing company says it’s fine, they’ve done this with hundreds of clients, including on the Fortune 500. Client says do it, boss says the inevitable stupid tax will be a good source of revenue, us techs are just paid to push buttons, so we create them their account.
Twenty-four hours pass. Security alert hits the queue. marketing.bozos@clientdomain.com has been restricted from sending out of 365 due to suspect outbound messages.
Then, they convinced the company to issue a second account.
Checking into it… the account was sending out standard boilerplate spam. We have a moment of ‘I told you so,’ get affected parties together, reiterate that this won’t fly, and recommend that they do what we told them to in the first place.
No, says the marketing company. This happens all the time. 365 just needs some time to adjust to their sending patterns. They “mimic human behavior,” after all. But we should create them a second marketing account so they can split their sends between them. This will totally fix it, promise.
Argument ensues, but at the end of it, the second account is created.
Twenty-four hours pass. Two security alerts hit the queue. marketing.bozos@clientdomain.com and marketing.bozos2@clientdomain.com have been restricted from sending out of 365 due to suspect outbound messages.
As you would expect, they received more security alerts.
Both accounts were sending out standard spam. The ‘I told you so’ is said with a sigh today. We again recommend they do what they’re supposed to.
No, says the marketing company. This has been happening increasingly often. What we really need is a third marketing account so they can be super absolutely sure this doesn’t happen again, super duper pinkie promise.
The ensuing argument has more tension this time around. A third account is created at the client’s insistence.
Twenty-four hours pass. Three security alerts hit the queue. marketing.bozos@clientdomain.com, marketing.bozos2@clientdomain.com, and marketing.bozos3@clientdomain.com have been restricted from sending out of 365 due to suspect outbound messages.
Fed up, the boss finally put a stop to it.
All three accounts are sending out standard spam. The ‘I told you so’ is said through gritted teeth.
Boss finally puts his foot down, says that we are not going to be creating an infinite series of licensed marketing user accounts. You are going to need to find both a new IT provider and a new domain at the current rate.
Argument ensues, further spam sales generation sends are paused until a resolution can be reached. A meeting is scheduled.
The meeting happens between myself, one of our senior techs/technical executives, stakeholders at the client, and the non-technical account manager from the marketing company.
Of course, the account manager was still trying to make the company look good.
Account manager insists on giving us the sales pitch for their company.
“We send bulk template emails to a list of potential customers and try to convince them to buy something,” says the account manager in her native tongue of corporate buzzword slop.
Great. Amazing. Tell us what ****** bulk sending platform you use and the SPF record you want us to add, and we can be done with this.
No, no, no, says the account manager. It’s not our business process to use those. We prefer a personalized approach. You see, we mimic realistic human behavior.
But ragardless of how you look at it, they were sending spam.
Our weird proprietary tool that we’ve grafted to this poor mailbox sends a message once exactly every 120 seconds—just like a human! We personalize our messages by using the same subject line every single time!
These are not standard marketing messages; they’re an AI-driven, personalized sales generation platform.
Transcendent. Enrapturing. You’re sending spam. You’re going to get the client blacklisted. I refuse to believe that we are the first people to have pointed this out to you.
At this point, something had to change.
Well, the account manager admits, we have been noticing these issues recently. Since last month, apparently. But we’re totally 100% certain that if we just keep at it, 365 will give up eventually!
We tell the client this is untenable, unsupportable, and poses a serious risk to their business operations. Marketing company refuses to budge.
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It is eventually ‘agreed’ to buy a clientdomainmarketing.com, use it to create a separate 365 environment, and let marketing company go wild without risk of contaminating the primary domain’s reputation.
Am I crazy? Does this sound like anything remotely reasonable? I feel like I’m going insane.
Wow. It sounds like they should’ve known better than to trust that situation.
Let’s take a look at what the folks over at Reddit think should’ve happened.
This person prefers Hello Dexter.
Here’s what this reader would’ve done.
That’s probably why most people have that same thought.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a tech support worker who told a manager a computer needed replaced, only to be told no thanks.
It seems like spammers always have some sort of excuse.
What did they think was going to happen?
Actually, the better question would be, how many times did they think they’d get away with it?
Surely, they knew that it wasn’t going to work. Especially if they knew anything at all about email servers.
Let’s hope the company learned an important lesson from all of this for the future.
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