Weird winery mailer

There is money to be made by selling mailing lists. It has been done for decades for snail mail and more recently for email. In some cases some company with the information sells their mailing list. The better companies that do this often tell you, but often in fine print, that they provide your address to "carefully selected businesses" that might be of interest to you. The best provide a box you have to check. Others provide the box checked, and you have to uncheck it to opt out. However many employees are not paid very much. There are companies that provide mailing lists for sale. They sometimes will pay a person in a company to give them the mailing list for a payment, unknown to the owners of the company. Also many companies use a mailing service rather than sending out messages in house. Just be glad you only received spam. Even bank employees have been tempted to sell addresses, account numbers, social security numbers, etc. Then some hackers are able to break into companies from time to time to steal personal information. At one time I was getting up to 20 phone calls per day around the holidays, wanting to sell me all sorts of things from wine to penny stock. After I got on the national and state do not call list, this helped. If a call comes in without caller ID, a privacy service of the phone company company first calls me and gives the options to answer, record, etc. I have 3 tones recorded on the answering machine the same as used by the phone company for phone numbers that are not in use. This causes many automated recorded messages to disconnect at once, because they do not want to waste their time on phone numbers that do not exist. By carefully filtering email and using several addresses for different things I am able to control email. Any address that appears in public, such as the one I use for this group, goes to my domain mail that is set up to not accept incoming mail after you have registered to post in a group or whatever. Most of my spam now comes by snail mail now. This greatly reduces the quantity, since someone has to pay postage.

Robert Parker's brother-in-law (I believe) owns Beaux Freres. I'd guess that if you are a TWA subscriber that's where it came from (though I don't recall getting any junk mail myself and I am a subscriber).

I'm a former WA subscriber and don't remember getting any Beaux Freres mailer. They probably bought a list,which could have gotten your address from any number of sources (retailers, wineries, publications).

Makes sense ("beaux freres" means brothers-in-law)

Fair enough, but then the question becomes what mailing list they could have purchased. I get mailers from Chehalem, Navarro, Merry Edwards and Joseph Swan, but I'd be surprised if any of them would sell their mailing list to a competing winery. Apart from them, it could only be a couple of retailers like CSW and Sam's, neither of which strikes me as a likely culprit.

Mark Lipton

Unfortunately the mailing list business is huge, and the provision of a targeted mailing list is quite lucrative. If you do a Google search on mailing list sales you will get nearly 800,000 hits. Besides the individual vineyards there are trade associations who gleefully combine mailing lists for the Common Good. I would be amazed if any of those vineyards did not share their mailing lists. And then there are the very directed lists that can be gotten from AmEx, Visa and the like, as in "sell me a list of your credit card customers in Zip code 10xxx who charged alcoholic beverages in the last 6 months," or magazines such as Spectator etc. Caveat emptor, except that the buyer has no idea it is happening.

pavane

Oh, yes. I had no doubts about that, only what the likely source of this information was. My father inadvertently performed a classic experiment in this vein. His writing was nearly illegible, so when he subscribed to Psychology Today, they misread his name as "Walter C. Thompson" (they at least got his first name right). For the next several years, we could monitor the propagation of "Walter C. Thompson" through various mailing lists... it was truly enlightening to see who was selling to whom ;-)

Mark Lipton

Mark, I got the same one I think.

Well, my writing is truly awful, and I've seen similar patterns. Yes, Dalew Illiamns was on some lists, as was Dave Villiam. I got some mailings for Dar Williams, but I'm not nearly as talented. One that irritated me for a long time (though never sold) was a charity that had me listed as Ms. Dale Williams. I realize I have a unisex name, but if not sure why put down anything?

The worst is when a mispelled mailing (or one that reverses my legal first name and middle name- Dale is actually my middle) comes with a preapproved credit card app with a $20,000 limit. Didn't take the credit meltdown for me to see something was wrong in Lendingville.

My mother's housemate had the opposite experience, equally annoying. Her name is Sidney Williams and at one point she started getting phone calls for the "Reverend Sidney Williams," who happened to be a man living in the same city. At first it was amusing hearing the long pause when she would respond "speaking," but after the tenth call from a creditor it became mighty old.

Mark Lipton

A few years ago, I was contracted to the animal health division of Wellcome NZ (the kiwi arm of the UK pharmaceutical company).

Owing to a faux pas in the office, I was included under Dr. Andrew Bourke in their internal database.

Initially, I only received their internal correspondence, but gradually (obviously, either the Company or someone within the group shared the database) I started to receive mail from other pharmaceutical manufacturers and suppliers.

It kept getting *worse* - I was literally bombarded with mail (this was pre-internet/email etc) and started getting things like free dairies; pens; then other sorts of inducements; I was offered free nights in hotels to attend product launches. (I confess to using this invitation a couple of times - without attending!)

About this time, I terminated the lease on my PO Box (I was in Australia) - and ordered that all inward mail be returned to sender - this the *problem* fixed itself.

Well, at least you got some fresh milk out of the whole oredeal :P

Mark Lipton

"Mark Lipton" wrote ......

^^^^^^^^

lol - come to think of it - have you dairied your trip to Lyon?

st.h

Mark is coming to Lyon? Bring a white Musar...

Yep, details to follow by email. You're closer to the source, Mike, so why don't you procure some?

Mark Lipton