Brands: B&S are SPAMMERS and you should know better!

I made a post a while ago, saying Brands should be more cautious about what lists they work with when they RENT email.
I also made a post a couple of days ago about SPAMS I received from some B&S list.

Guess what? I unsubscribed 3 times the day I made the post and I received a new mail for Bwin today.

Of course I reported B&S to Spamcop and Signal-Spam (a french governmental SPAM complaint system) today.

Last time I said that Brands should be more cautious, I now start to believe that they are partly responsible for this...

In another life I was a traffic buyer for a website and believe me when I launched a campaign (affiliate program, banner campaign or email DB rental) I always tried to get some information on who was the partner and how the campaign would be ran.

It seems to me some Brands are not making all these checks prior to running the campaign, since there are soooo many ways to identify B&S as dodgy list just by checking a couple of elements or asking for a test email:
- B&S has no website (at least in no website link in the email)
- The reply-to email is a Gmail address !!!!!!!
- There is no global unsubscribe link most of the time (only a link to unsubscribe from the Brand they are sending)
- There is an advertising banner on the unsubscribe page oO
- There is no unsubscribe confirmation page (it loads google's website!)

So once again: please, please, please check out who you work with, this kind of practices might one day kill the email marketing and will definitely harm your Brand's image.