ARIN WHOIS for leads

Fri Jul 26 17:04:08 UTC 2013

> What happen to the days when you could simply tell someone not
> interested, don't call again and you wouldn't hear from them ever
> again?????

I don't know, but that is part of the reason why you can't ignore these people or buy from them.

Ever heard of the "one bite at the apple" idea? Marketers think they should each be able to ask you just once to buy something from them. Ignoring the fact they ask more than once, in the US alone, there are 23 million small businesses <http://www.sba.gov/content/small-business-trends>.

How many calls / emails do you want to get if even 10% of them decide they get _one_ chance to ask you to buy something?

The reason this is not a problem for snail mail is there has to be a serious return to cover the cost of printing, postage, etc. What's the cost of sending 23 million emails? Two cents?

> Or the days when everything wasn't treated as spam????

Everything is not.

I admit that "the other side" frequently goes in-frickin'-sane and calls even non-scraped, individually addressed mail to a single person "spam". We shouldn't listen to them any more than we should listen to the marketer calling back the four time in a week to sell my father life insurance - after he had passed away.

Suggestion: Put tagged addresses and, if possible, phone numbers in your ARIN whois and other public records. When someone emails that address or calls that number, make sure you put them on a "never buy from" list, and they know it. Write them a physical (form) letter, explaining why, and make it public (web page, blog, whatever. If even a small percentage of people did this, many companies would change their practices. _Especially_ Internet companies.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

On Jul 26, 2013, at 11:59 , "Otis L. Surratt, Jr." <otis at ocosa.com> wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick W. Gilmore [mailto:patrick at ianai.net] 
> Sent: Friday, July 26, 2013 9:47 AM
> To: NANOG list
> Subject: Re: ARIN WHOIS for leads
> 
> On Jul 25, 2013, at 19:29 , "Otis L. Surratt, Jr." <otis at ocosa.com>
> wrote:
>> From: Warren Bailey [mailto:wbailey at satelliteintelligencegroup.com]
> 
>>> Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of maintaining the whois?
>> 
>> Yep!
>> 
>>> We registered a few domains and get the same thing, I think it's
>> something that people are going to have to live with. :/
>> 
>> I agree. We just politely tell them we are not interested and move on 
>> about our day. Some cold callers we have taken up on offers. It just 
>> depends who calls and whether or not we are looking for new service.
>> WHOIS Privacy is nice for the domains and we use for some of our 
>> domains but not all. We just hate when customers get those scam 
>> notices and call us or open tickets about it.
> 
>>> The fact you take some cold callers "up on offers" means they will
> continue to call.
> 
>>> Please do not reward people who scrape whois or the NANOG-l archive.
> If it is not profitable to call people, they will stop.
> 
>>> Put another way: You are making life worse for all of us.
> 
>>> --
>>> TTFN,
>>> patrick
> 
> I'm not sure how they receive their data or if they mined from other
> sources. But one can draw some conclusions that they get information
> from some list/database and if you are a new provider or a new recipient
> of number resources then yes; that's probably how ARIN WHOIS database.
> 
> But why don't we take off our hat for one moment that would call this
> spam and simply look at it for what it is. I'm sure others would agree.
> Sales teams typically would compile a list of names and phone numbers in
> a local community and cold call to see if there is any interest. Waiting
> on folks to call you could be weeks, months and years thus adversely
> affecting your business. I'm sure every company has done some cold
> calling before. If you have not then you must have a customer base of
> that is making you the profit you desire and/or you are already a
> billionaire. Thus you the resources for advertisements on
> local/regional/national TV. (Not the only form of advertising BTW)
> 
> I can name several tier 1 and 2 providers who have reached out to us for
> IP transit based on cold calling/ARIN WHOIS. 
> We've been an ARIN paying member since 2005 and have not had any contact
> with any sales folks until last 4 to 5 years maybe.
> 
> IMHO, you guys should get off this spam kick and simply tell folks you
> are not interested and move on about your day. Life is way too short.
> I'm not sure how cold calling is spamming? 
> 
> The folks that received the porn calls.... my response is SMH and I am
> very disgusted. But I definitely can understand your feelings for cold
> calling. Again, life is too short to get all worked up about it. Like I
> said before simply tell them not interested and don't call again. We do
> and we very seldom find a stubborn sales person that continue with
> repeated calls. For the ones we do we have our phone system immediately
> hang up their call based on number. If they someone how gain my or
> others mobile numbers we simply add as contact and send to voicemail.
> After a while they'll get the message. One I threaten him and he never
> called again. I wouldn't recommend but it worked! LOL
> 
> Everyone's point is we shouldn't have to deal with or provide those
> types of workarounds for unprofessional sales folks that don't
> understand the word "NO". And I whole heartily agree.
> 
> What happen to the days when you could simply tell someone not
> interested, don't call again and you wouldn't hear from them ever
> again?????
> Or the days when everything wasn't treated as spam????
> 
> --Otis
> 
> 
> 