• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 4, 2003

No one knows for sure how many degrees of separation actually exist between a legitimate email marketing effort and the emergence of spam, but a new email tracking service is beginning to find out. And much to the surprise of its analysts, it took as little as one month before a legitimate email marketing effort morphed into the most heinous of all unsolicited email offers: pornography.

"Frankly, we were quite surprised. This was not supposed to happen," says Bill McCloskey, CEO of Emerging Interest, which has quietly been developing the new competitive media tracking system for commercial email marketers. But while the service, dubbed Computer Email Tracking System (CETS), was created to understand the dynamics of legitimate email marketing initiatives, the system has stumbled across an unintended epiphany, that even the most pure of commercial email efforts can rapidly degrade into the most disreputable forms of spam.

In fact, it took exactly one month after a pseudo address created by CETS signed up to an ostensibly legitimate consumer promotion offer by American Giveaways before it began receiving pornography from one of its trading partners.

"We don't necessarily think there was any direct connection between American Giveaways and the pornography. Our guess is that they are just very fast and lose in terms of who they partner with," says McCloskey. "It's kind of like six degrees of separation. What we're finding out is how long it takes for something like this to happen."

Because CETS email addresses don't exist anywhere but on the specific commercial email lists they register to be on, McCloskey says they are not prone to the kind of email harvesting used by conventional spammers to gather names off the Web.

"What we're finding, is the opt-in universe doesn't look at lot different than a person's email inbox, except that we don't receive the penis enlargement ads, or Viagra, or those kinds of things. So, we were surprised to see pornography," says McCloskey, adding, "What we do receive, is a lot of home-based work offers, credit card and debt management services and all kinds of patches" for treating health-related maladies.

McCloskey says his efforts to contact Synergy 6, which owns and operates the American Giveaways site were unfruitful. His phone calls were not returned and his email correspondence, which ironically bounced back because Synergy 6's email box was full.

In a positive note, CETS analysts took steps to opt-out of the pornographic spam to learn how long and how successful those efforts might be. Following several days, the pornographic messages stopped.

While the CETS system is revealing some surprising insights into the viral nature of spam, its main purpose is to function as a competitive campaign tracking system for legitimate email marketers. Since launching, CETS has built a databases of pseudo email users receiving hundreds of commercial email correspondences each day from marketers on or related to nearly 50 lists. McCloskey says the database currently covers 1,800 brands and average 500 discrete email messages per day.

The database currently is comprised mainly of consumer packaged goods and pharmaceutical marketers. The service will be expanded shortly to track email marketing in the automotive, financial and travel categories.

"Think of it as AdRelevance for email," says McCloskey, referring to the Nielsen//NetRatings unit that tracks online ad campaigns for marketers and ad agencies.

"One of the things we can tell is what is the marketing strategy is," says McCloskey. By tracking the day in and day out correspondence of email marketers, he says CETS is able to determine: "What kind of lists do they purchase? How often to they email? How doest this begin to change over time? How does their message change. How often to they alter the content?"