Isilon – makers of what look to be a very cool scale-out NAS solution just sent me an email.
Now, I was expecting their email, so this isn’t an issue of spam at all (in fact, when they scanned my badge at VMware Forum I commented that I would be watching for their email, and to be honest, I said it to every booth person doing scanning). I was excited to see the message because I want to talk to Isilon about their product.
My received email looks like this:
I responded to the message stating that I would like to talk to her about budgetary pricing and how Isilon may work in my network.
My phone rang about 5-6 minutes after I sent my message out and a nice gentleman was on the phone from Isilon.
When I stated that I had sent an email to a Deborah and asked why I was getting a call back from him, he, honestly it seems, told me that there is no such person by the name of Deborah Levin in the company and that this is done to give some personality to the message.
He could have lied to me; told me that Deborah was busy and passed him the lead and I would have taken that at face value. Instead he (seemingly) told the truth, that Isilon (and EMC as their owners) do this through a third party email service provider (all headers in the email are Isilon headers).
But he didn’t lie, and for that I look forward to his email for later contact with him, if I can get the bad taste out of my mouth.
Pertinent headers:
Received: from mail01.info.isilon.com (unknown [204.92.21.14]) by smtpgrey-2.iphouse.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2064F3D7667 for <my-email>; Wed, 3 Aug 2011 11:56:26 -0500 (CDT)
Message-Id: <1b53bd039cbe4772a93c38749f6a68d4@1135>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”–boundary_10086078_b76909b6-4a0e-4dae-9655-32f63a61adcf”
Return-Path: [email protected]
Received-Spf: None (mail.corp.iphouse.net: [email protected] does not designate permitted sender hosts)
So there we have it…slimy marketing tricks.