TCOBaG – kNow ThiNkIng AllOwEd

I, like many others out there who have a number of domains (er, especially un/under-developed ones get a fair number of enqueries about them. Most of the enqueries are just junk, some are actual spam, but this one appears to be a scam for an appraisal service.

email’s like this:

Don’t know for sure what the scam is, but appears to be trying to drive folks to the first appraisal site link (fleos.com –sound too much like ‘fleece’ to anyone besides me?) which was registered in July of this year, and offers lower prices than Sedo (um, who doesn’t?

A couple of notes on checking authenticity:

1. Real buyers that represent companies don’t use gmail (well, except to forward/manage email) as their primary contact information.

2. Real buyers don’t ask for your payment options and promise to send the money before you have worked out the transfer process.

Good luck selling any domains or sites you have, but do your homework and deal with reputable buyers/sellers.

Okay, so I had a few questions/comments come in about using the ‘report as spam’ button.

Look, I know it’s easy, and sometimes you get that little ‘ooo, that’ll teach them’ feeling, or you really just are lazy and/or think ‘this is crap, I asked for it, but this stinks’ feeling, but you really need to use a little caution here.

Here’s a reply I made about this:

No problem marking real spam as spam, and if you did not ever subscribe, do not hit the unsubscribe button as that will only confirm to the spammers an active email address and most likely not remove you from the list. But if you subscribed, find the unsubscribe link and use it. If that doesn’t remove you with 48 hours, report it.

However, you really need to be careful in two ways:
1. If you’re forwarding other email addy’s to Yahoo! or gmail and report it as spam, the service provider is marking ‘your’ email as the sender. Just delete those.
2. If you’re not sure, don’t recall, then just delete.

gmail also uses user actions to ‘learn’ what’s spam. It’s not really new technology.

Bottom line is simple.

If you subscribed, do the ethical thing and unsuscribe. Give the system a chance to work for you.

If you did not subscribe, and you’re really sure about that (look at the bottom of the email message where most good, ethical email marketers often include such information for things like possibly your IP address, a date, time, from when you subscribed), then report it.

Also, regularly check your spam and trash folders for legitimate emails and ‘de-mark’ them. This will help train most of the better email service providers algorithms to act appropriately in the future for you, and sometimes for others as well.