Earlier today I posted about three Irish spams I’d received in the morning. I didn’t go into any detail, as I was busy with other things and also wanted to see how Monster would handle the situation.
The email that they sent to several hundred people included a lot of email addresses that I recognised for one reason or another. Hardly surprising as all the businesses in question belong to IT@Cork.
The email carries the “imaginative” subject line – “For the attention of your HR department!!”, which is never a good sign. Of course it’s even worse when you consider we actually have a page on our site dedicated to careers etc., Of course it doesn’t say “please send HR spam here”, so maybe it wasn’t obvious enough … Who knows?
The email itself is really pathetic:
Good Morning,
Firstly, I would like to clarify that we are not a recruitment agency.
I have just come across your company information and I wanted to introduce my self to you. My name is John Burns and I am the business development manager for Monster in Ireland North and South.
Monster is the biggest online recruitment website in the World and we have a large portfolio of solutions to make your recruitment more cost affective, quicker, and easier to manage.
Click here to see our portfolio of solutions
Are you tired of waiting on the right candidates to respond to your advertisements? If so our unique Monster CV Database may be just what you are looking for. Our Database gives you the freedom to search for your ideal candidates and download their CV or contact details immediately. With over 250,000 CV’s in our Irish Database and an average of 6,600 new CV’s added every month your chances of finding the “right candidates” is exceptionally high.
In addition to our CV Database we have Job postings where you can post your vacancies on Monster and start receiving top candidates almost immediately, again with our average daily job views of 29,000 your vacancy is sure to be noticed and replied to.
I would love to make an appointment with you where I can take you through our website and show you all the different features and functions that are on offer and I can leave you with a day’s trial of our CV Database where you can try it out for your self and you never now, you may find a candidate or two that could be potential employees!
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
PS: Please accept my apologies if you recieved this Email in error.
Kind Regards,
John Burns
Business Development Manager
www.monster.ie
15d Gilford Road
Sandymount
Dublin 4
Tel: +353 (0)1 xxxxxxxxxxxx
Fax: +353 (0)1 xxxxxxxxx
Mobile: +353 (86) xxxxxxxxxxx
Monthly visits average 350,000 in 2007
Over 6,700 new CVs added to the CV Database in July 2007
Best online Recruitment & Training Website in Ireland – Golden Spider Award Winners
Monster Worldwide Limited. Registeredin Ireland with number 337700. Registered office: Hillview House, 15D Gilford Road, Sandymount, Dublin 4
Privileged/Confidential Information may be contained in this message. If you are not the addressee indicated in this message, (or responsible for delivery of the message to such person), you may not copy or deliver this message to anyone. In such case, you should destroy this message and kindly notify the sender by reply email. Please advise immediately if you or your employer does not consent to email for messages of this kind. Opinions, conclusions and other information in this message that do not relate to the official business of the Monster Worldwide Limited shall be understood as neither given nor endorsed by it. For more information on our business ethical standards please refer to our website
Note carefully that the email is not addressed to anyone in particular.
It’s a general email that has been sent en masse, or in other words it’s unsolicited bulk (commercial) email.
So the apology in the PS is even odder. Why would you send a bulk email spam and then try to get out of it by apologising?
And of course he has included the standard disclaimer. The fact that he can’t spell doesn’t help either….
His usage of capitalisation and general writing style is worryingly bad…
So what to do?
Well the obvious thing would be to contact the person who sent it, so I did. I rang him this afternoon. He didn’t want to hear about my complaints and was totally unrepentant. Seemingly scraping addresses from websites and using them for marketing purposes (ie. spamming) is perfectly acceptable for Monster’s staff.
That’s a serious issue for any company. It’s even more serious when you consider the issues they’ve had recently with security.
In the first instance this is unsolicited. I don’t want it. My staff don’t want it.
It was sent to a business email address, so unless they keep abusing our email addresses I can’t do much about it legally. Under current Irish legislation they can get away with sending the first spam, but once you tell them to stop they have to. If they don’t stop they’re breaking the law.
However there are other things that I can do.
First off I can submit the offending email to several DNS blacklists (they’re used by mail admins to block unwanted mails from entering their systems). Any other IT@Cork members who got hit by this junk need to submit the mail to spamcop et al as soon as possible (it has to be reported within 48 hours)
I could also instruct our technical staff to block all mail emanating from Monster from reaching any domains on our network, as we are perfectly entitled to block abuse of our network and email abuse is abuse whether Monster are willing to accept or not. I don’t want to take that measure as yet, but it’s an option I am considering.
Online recruitment is a highly competitive, but obviously lucrative, market. Can Monster afford to spam?
Maybe they need to get a hard lesson in the effects of having their smtp blocked by a major blacklist.
I’ve always considered spammers to be lazy, but I never thought I’d see a big company like Monster stooping this low.
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