Is Planet Ocean spamming subscribers?

I am a paying subscriber of Planet Ocean Communications’ Search Engine News “The UnFair Advantage Book on Winning the Search Engine Wars & Search Engine News Update Newsletter” and I usually refer to as one of the best resources for SEO beginners.

They just sent me an e-mail with this month password to access the newsletter, but I got a surprise when I clicked on the link included in their e-mail and all of the sudden, a bunch of tabs of my Mozilla browser opened, showing many spammy sites.

First, I thought a Trojan or some kind of spyware infected me, but then I went to the email itself and checked the URL, and surprisingly I found that the link to their page contained many more characters than usual.

This is the previous month link to their page:

<a href="http://www.SearchEngine-News.com">http://www.SearchEngine-News.com</a>

Code (markup):

This is this month’s link to their page:

<a href="http://www.planetocean.com/mailing/lt/t_go.php?i=12&amp;e=bWFya2V0aW5nQGNvc3RhcmljYS10cmF2ZWxpbmZvLmNvbQ==&amp;l=http://www.planetocean.com/mailing/lt/t_go.php|Q|i|E|12|A|e|E|bWFya2V0aW5nQGNvc3RhcmljYS10cmF2ZWxpbmZvLmNvbQ==|A|l|E|http://www.SearchEngine-News.com">http://www.SearchEngine-News.com</a>

Code (markup):

Is any of you a subscriber too and have you experienced the same problem?

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Hi, this is Ian from Planet Ocean, publishers of Search Engine News.

The link you saw was from this new mailing software we were experimenting with. It encodes URL variables with pipes ( | ).

There's a strange bug in Firefox which causes a new window to be openened when clicking a link from an external program (such as your email client) that contains pipes in the URL. It opens a new window for each pipe encountered in the URL.

It takes the next character after the pipe as the URL to open. Since Firefox automatically does a "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search when anything other than a URL or domain name is typed in, you get a bunch of random sites opening in multiple tabs in the browser.

We've decided that the new mailing software was too buggy for our use and have gone back to our old system.

Bottom line, we don't and won't ever spam anyone, period. That would be the most monumentally stupid thing for us to do to our customers after taking so long to build the trust we have over the past eight years of publishing Search Engine News.

I hope that answers your question!

Best regards,

Ian
Planet Ocean Communications
http://www.searchengine-news.com/

 

I'm impressed Ian. I don't currently subscribe to your report, but I'm impressed that you took the time to explain what happend and why it happened. Kudos to you.

 

I second that.

This is the kind of service I have received (and expect) for all the years I’ve been a Planet Ocean subscriber.

Thank you Ian, for taking the time to respond and thank you for keeping the customers interests in mind and discarding the use of that mailing software.

Bottom-line: Still one of the best resources for SEO beginners and professionals.
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Planet Ocean does not spam

you might want to mail that to your clients...in case they dont make it to this forum...heaven forbid !

GEM