eHarmony - putting the "Harm" in Email Marketing

eHarmony appears to be employing affiliates that in turn spam people.

My Yahoo! account gets 1-3 messages touting the virtues of eHarmony each day. They seem to be from a number of different affiliates, using different templates, servers and email sending software.

The messages all include links that redirect back to the same link tracking system, and then on to an eHarmony sign up page.

The messages are being sent to an old Yahoo! account of mine which is probably in every spam database known to man. They make no claim about where they got my email address from. I'm sure back in the 1990's I at least once filled out a form saying it was OK to sell my email address to anyone for any purpose. My mistake.

Some of the messages use a dirty trick known as Bayesian poisoning. The idea is to include a large amount of random text inside the email message, which can confuse Bayesian based programs. The extra text appears to "dilute" the content that looks like unsolicited advertising.

SpamButcher's fuzzy logic spam control isn't effected by this problem. In fact, I'm happy to say that it's caught about 95% of eHarmony's spam so far.

To be careful here - I'm not suggesting that eHarmony or their affiliates are doing something illegal. Unsolicited email marketing is still perfectly legal in the United States. CAN-SPAM introduced a few new regulations, but didn't outlaw UCE. A casual examination of the email in question didn't reveal any obvious violations.

What I am saying is that I'd hope a company which presents itself as being more "wholesome" than its competition would not be such a bunch of douche-bags when it came to their marketing strategies.

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