Email Brand Reputation Wars
Aug 14 2008
How often do you get emails spoofing or looking to be from a brand name that you trust? I get them every now and then but this one had me double taking, looking at the headers, and opening it up to code to see what or who it was really from. Now when you go to this length to use a brand like CNN and deliver creative that makes even me think, it has to impact your brand.
I would assume that many people would see this and wonder… Did I opt into this? What was the clincher for me was that it was sent to our Abuse email address that is one that only the ISPs have for feedback loops.
So if this is happening to your brand what can you do? The truth is not much. It is really hard to always have an eye on what others are doing for to or with your brand in email. I could recommend that using Bill McCloskey’s company Email Data Source could help you to take a peek into what is going on out there. You might be surprised to see all the offers, emails, spoofs and more using your brand attributes, name and logos.
The other path is to start fighting it by submitting them to spam cop and all the other blacklist sources…. but could that negatively impact your brand? I think it could. Maybe Bill will post his thoughts around this topic of how a brand can manage reputation when it is out of their control.
This is not something that should keep you as an email marketer or brand manager up at night… but it should be in your thoughts and on your radar.
Actually after I wrote this post I came across this on the CNN Blog
Published in ISP Relations, Spam Emails, The Spam Cops, Worst Of Email on Thursday, August 14th, 2008
(3 votes, average: 4 out of 5) 
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August 14th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Dylan,
Thanks for posting this and the mention of Email Data Source. Our product, Email Analyst, does indeed give you insight into how your brand is being perceived. In recent months, I have noticed a tremendous upswing in spoofed “From” addresses: emails that use legitimate companies names in the From title, but are in fact spam. At least, once opened, now one is going to mistake it for anything but spam, but it is amazing how much of this we now see.
Much worse, of course, is the amount of emails that are true phishing schemes. We have a number of clients using our tool specifically for this type of monitoring. One of the things that our tool provides is the ability to see exactly where we opted in to receive an email. Everything we do is with unique email addresses, so these phishing schemes can be traced back to the legitimate sites that we opted into in the first place. This can provide at least a starting ground for determining security problems with the email addresses at particular companies.
Bill