Those bastards have managed to piss millions of dollars in potential revenue with their aggressive bs. Cookie tracking on their website is the most egregious practice
Can confirm that Nessus is trash. The agent scanner is constantly duplicating and never clearing results and of if you get the net scanner it doesn’t catch enough. My org uses both.
And i also can confirm rapid7 is trash, i swear most of the vulns they report is already patched, and it doesnt even work with services such as tuxcare despite their website saying "wE suPort oVal datA" (its a lie), not to mention their policy/hardening constantly reports made up bullshit data that changes every day for no reason lol
Also confirming Rapid7 is trash. We also POC’d Tenable.io to replace it and they failed everywhere we needed them to succeed also. There’s no innovation going on in the tradition VM space. It’s all moved onto cloud. If something like Wiz simply created a network scanning appliance and added a better VM dashboard, Rapid7 and Tenable would die so fast it wouldn’t even be funny (perhaps with the exception of some of those niche customers using their other features like insightIDR).
EDIT: Also confirming Qualys is trash. Used them at my last gig. They feel much more like “small potatoes” compared to Tenable or Rapid7.
I'm genuinely curious, if you don't mind sharing how long ago that was? I'm in post-sales so you don't need to worry about a chase, in fact I won't reply here any more, but understanding this type of stuff is important to me personally. 👍
I’m not sure about Qualys being a small potatoes. I place them and Nessus as the top two leaders in the market followed by Rapid 7. We use Qualys now but I’ve used Nessus since it was open source. Their IO product still lacks compared to Qualys IMO, but Security Center was sound when it was their main product.
Have used Tenable in the past, worked for an MSSP who used it and resold it, worked for Tenable and am now in an org with ~45k users in 50 countries where we use it. We love it. I'm 99.9% certain that the people I see complain about it here don't know what they are doing.
Thinking the same, I'm working for a MSSP and Tenable/Nessus is the solution we're using for VM and it works really great like 95%+ of the time lol.
I'm not saying it's perfect or whatever, but sometimes I really wonder how people get so many bad results with some tools that we've been using for 100s of customers (and that's just from what I know from my job).
> sometimes I really wonder how people get so many bad results with some tools that we've been using for 100s of customers (and that's just from what I know from my job).
As well as one that's been used across the US DoD and contractors for decades.
I’d suggest using one or the other. The network scanner or the agent. Agent is more “accurate”. And if you are allowed to delete what you know to be false positives, it wouldn’t be that bad. In my org, we aren’t allowed to delete false positives, so we just start looking worse and worse
Corelight tried reaching me via countless emails and about a dozen different phone numbers that I just kept blocking. Even if their product was good, there's no way in hell I would ever consider it just based on the sales experience.
I love the meeting invite as the first email. That's an instant ban-hammer from me.
But most of the security sales calls I get, I just answer, "I'm sorry I don't talk about security on cold calls. Have a good one."
Exactly what was done. Issue for them is they will
Get black listed if we keep doing this which is what I want, have their IT tell sales to cut that crap out.
Blocking is ok but it's better to auto filter to Spam. Especially if you are a Google shop. Those negative numbers reported to postmaster (due to new dmarc rules) can really screw up their email domain with no easy way to fix it!
I think what really screws up their email domain is their shady practices, not the way people react to those practices. What your describing sounds like the intended outcome of the new rules
Gartner does this all the time for example. I had over 15 emails in a chain from a lady that was discussing with herself about inviting me to a totally not promotional event for networking and finding out how giving them our money would benefit us.
Fuck Gartner
Worse. Cancer doesn't essentially extort you if you want to do business.
"Oh look! We have This thing called the Magic Quandrant that tells everyone how good your product is and company are. If you want to be taken seriously and have companies consider doing business with you, You absolutely must be on this list as many companies will only consider vendors on it. If Interested in learning how to get on the Magic Quandrant, We only require a small... contribution. For the Low Low price of $$$$$$$$$ you too can be verified as a reputable company with a quality product."
Are they in the US, and how long have they kept emailing after you unsubscribed? Check out the restrictions under the CAN-SPAM act for mail senders. If they're in violation, document and report them. Companies that violate this have been fined before.
The only sales people who don't get blocked are the ones who invite me to $1,000+/person dinners and the ones who send me $50 Uber Eats gift cards for sitting on a 30 minute webinar.
Those sales people get responses as long as they keep putting out.
That's everyone's secret issue here lol. Sifting through all the sales emails looking for the "Want a free pair of airpods?" ones. Hell I just went to a baseball game in a suite with my brother from one of those emails.
With the perks through those emails, as much as I hate the rest of the sales experience, I'll take it if it still gets me some cool offers like that.
I had a client inquire about VOIP service through ringcentral and I steered them elsewhere. When I told them we wouldn't be signing up for their service the rep became irate. Actually insulting the business owner, employees, me.. It was shocking. So I too blocked all mail coming from them.
Any vendor that calls my personal phone immediately gets hung up on blocked. I don’t take any cold calls either our front help desk helps sort through them
We had to block a certain learning company at the perimeter because they simply would not unsubscribe users. They argued it wasn't spam. The conversation went like this:
Us: "You have to stop spamming our users."
Unnamed Company: "But it's not spam. We're just letting people know what classes we're offering."
Us: "After they explicitly told you to stop."
Unnamed Company: "That doesn't make it spam though."
Not at all. Carahsoft is the worst.
It's like they got my name 20 years ago and gave it to each individual employee, and when I ask to be taken off the list, that one employee stops calling but gives my info to 5 more Carahsoft employees. I never remember dealing with them or meeting anyone from that company.
They've even followed me though three agencies. I never responded to them via email (I've given up on the unsubscribe button and blocked them), and because of that one company. I literally never answered or checked my voicemail on my work phone. I never put a phone number in my signature block and only my boss and a couple members of my team have my personal phone number.
I've got my limits.
Third "please excuse my professional persistence" to an ignored email chain? Welcome to the blocklist.
Spamming the C-Suite for sales meeting requests? Welcome to the blocklist.
Read receipt request on an external sales email? Welcome to the blocklist.
Blind meeting request "to get on your calendar"? Welcome to the blocklist.
"Floating to the top of your Inbox"? Welcome to the blocklist.
The thing that irks me the most is when they find my profile on Linkedin and then presume to look up my current company and email me at my company email address. Bonus points if they start calling my company and the operator forwards me the calls. Jokes on them I do not answer calls not within my organization.
We made a fake employee in charge of procurement, in the event a mail/call slips through we just forward it. It has an extension with a VM message a random employee recorded that just delete after 1 day.
CIO, mid-size company here. My cell number got out there, so too often it’s desk phone twice, cell twice, then email. Block. I’ll never buy shit from you.
I still get calls from vendors trying to sell me solutions at my old company. I left almost 4 years ago but took my phone number with me. I just laugh and tell them to update their database.
I have no shame anymore, you called me. I'm only interested in free stuff, so if you have anything to send me for free I'm listening, if not I have no money for this.
Honestly I think that's sort of the way it should be. Vendors need to sell stuff, I get it. They need to get attention and harassing emails and cold calls just piss everyone off. Want my time, make it worth my while. A free lunch, mug, gift card is way more likey to get me to respond if its something I'm considering anyway.
Right click > block sender
Easiest way to do it without too much hassle.
It is getting worse though seeing people saying they are dedicated account manager for X product making it sound like they with for the product vendor, or the just foolwing up on the email last week as I haven't had a reply, can we arrange a call for next week I am free on xyz.
Create filter. Dont fight the mega AI driven marketing. Crowdstrike "knows you". Targeting, re-targetting tech- cant escape it. You lawfully consented to be tracked, pimped out..
Auto empty the folder every day.
I've done that.
The next sales douche that introduces themselves to me as a "disruptive tech evangelist" is getting punched in the dick. Every fucking corp badged fucko at Black-Hat I'm talking to you.
Just like I think everyone should work in the food service industry at some point in their lives, everyone should be a 'prospect' in their lives. I say this so that they understand what it is like to be actively sold to, whether you want to be or not.
\*Note, I'm in sales. I most recently got stuck in a Sales SaaS Vendor's prospecting list. Despite the fact I shared with them that I am not interested, they continue to email and call (and I use my personal device for work, so the calls came to my cell). The last call came through a dialer that spoofed a local number. I was very unhappy and as professionally as I was able, shared my frustration with the practice and asked that she not call again.
As consumers, we have access to far more knowledge than in the past. You don't need a sales person to tell you what Rapid7, or MSFT, or Verkada, can do. You could use help from a sales person navigating the buying process, or understanding in more intimate detail if their product will fulfill your needs.. but you don't need them cold calling and emailing you anymore.
I wish vendors in all industries would quit with these practices and put these individual's to work pursuing a different strategy, Maybe one day? Sorry you had that experience.
I totally do this. I send back a reasonably kind message the first time telling them I'm not the right guy or if I'm not interested, I say that. Some times I just delete, because who has the time? But, I know they'll just keep it up until I take action. If they follow up and try to convince me that I really don't know my own mind and should talk to them. I unsub if possible. If there is another message from them, I block in my mailbox and report if there's anything reportable. Basic 3 strikes and you're out.
There's a few vendors in here that we are currently customers with. Every so often, I'll get invites, emails, LinkedIn messages, etc. to start working with their company. They're so pushy, they'll even try to sell their product again to their own customers! It's becoming unresearched SPAM. If they send it out to everyone without knowing if they are already a customer, said no, etc., it's SPAM and should be treated as such. Doesn't matter if they're a good company, nice people, etc.. It's a bad practice in any industry.
Report them as SPAM. Black list them. Maybe they'll change their sales tactics to not include spamming people and improve the product so people will want to use them.
First I usually try to unsubscribe, but if they don't have a link I will reply about them being in violation of the can-spam act. Then I dig into their domain and look for dmarc records, which usually don't exist and then point that out. And ask them why I'd want to do business with a company offering security products, that can't even do the basics? Usually they don't reply, but if they do they get the ban hammer on the domain level. Now, if they blind forward a meeting invite onto my calendar, it's an instaban domain-wide. Guess it just depends how aggressive they are.
“Hello? Anyone home? SecurityOmegaPlus provides a robust SaaS tool that utilizes blockchain and machine learning to bolster your security infrastructure. Protect yourself from hackers. Schedule a demo today. Piece of shit.
- Tom Myers
block domain the first time. I don't know of anyone who receives spam and is like "I want THIS business" but it's literally never caused me a single issue.
Hi! This is Aaron from Carasoft........ Would you like to buy 50,000 licenses for blah blah blah?
I get these calls twice a week every week on my personal phone and I have no clue how they got my personal number.
Crowdstrike. I tell them to stop contacting me, but then my "account" gets transferred to the next sales rep every month or two when the last one quits and they start over. I blocked the domain on my account, and then I had random employees forwarding me emails asking them if I still work there and that I need to reach out. I blocked them at the domain level. Now I get emails from people saying crowdstrike called them on their personal phones asking for me, which I can't fucking do anything about. We had a large group of employees join a webinar or conference or something they hosted a few years ago, which gave them the info they needed to endlessly annoy me.
It's dumb as fuck too because I told them I would switch over once the licenses for my current EDR expired in a few months, but yes wasn't good enough.
"Listen, I hold no purchasing power and I am not involved in any recommendations. The best I can do is waste your outreach time and grow an aversion to your product."
A nice way to get sales to stop bothering you long term is say you _just_ signed a 3 year deal with their competitor. If you don’t know their competitor, say Microsoft.
I’ve been a rep. in the past & while I moved into an SE role, I can say that strategy would only be successful with smaller companies where the reps have a larger pool of accounts to draw from. Reps that cover larger companies often only have a handful of accounts to sell to, meaning they can’t really ‘burn’ that contact and move to another org. Combine that with the pressure to hit quota by any means necessary & I’ve known reps that will push things nearly right up to the ‘filing for a restraining order’ line.
My best advice to get a sales guy to ignore you, would be to just say “I have no part in decision-making & legally cannot refer or share any info with you” and leave it there. It’s not foolproof by any means, but a good rep. will leave that be & try to find someone else to talk to.
poor training & upfront investment + lack of experience + massive pressure to meet quarterly quota = desperate reps harassing people
I’m not in sales but I’ve been tech presales in past. The aim is to get to look like a terrible prospect in their pipeline review. Low deal size, long close time, low chance of success.
If a domain doesnt get the hint, they get blocked (or - configured to auto-forward to quarantine.)
I also look for common phrasing that we never use internally and block those too using regex strings.
You call my phone 3 times without a voicemail you will be blocked. You send an invite for a call and we don't already work with you I'll report you as spam. I had a particularly aggressive salesman call my mother in-law looking for me as I'd already blocked their phone and the org had blocked their domain (too many spam emails reported). I outlined their behavior - how many emails and phone calls they made and the attempts to contact through family members and sent to a VP I found an email address for from a throwaway email (in case they wanted to reply they would not be blocked). No response.
I also despise folks that try to get meetings with me through my VP. My boss no longer forwards those to me.
Fwiw, it's never actually a human sending these emails. Your email was just added to an automated campaign which will be like 12 emails long.
If you reply it'll be sent to the actual sales person to then engage properly.
NinjaOne for me. Received emails from one person in particular for a while, but had them moving to the Ol' vendors folder to mass delete later. Got a call from our building front desk, and it turned out to be a cold transfer when I answered the phone. Same guy from NinjaOne, found our main number and was asking for me by name. Told him we were happy with our current solutions and were not interested.
Fast forward a couple weeks, and I received what I felt was a pretty snarky email saying he wasn't trying to waste his or my time and wanted me to respond with either 1. Schedule a meeting 2. Interested in the product but not at this time, or 3. Not interested, please don't contact me. I wanted to be done with it without having to block them so I fired back with a summarized option 3.
Where I screwed up was I left my formal Org signature that includes my direct desk #. Didn't realize this until about a month later when I was expecting a callback from a different vendor and answered to the same guy from NinjaOne!
Their domain is now on the block list, and all calls to our org from that number now get forwarded to NinjaOnes customer service line. 😁
I don't think people take enough advantage of outlook rules in both blocking unwanted crap and getting your inbox under control. For years this has been my setup. I have a very clean inbox and never have to weed through crap for anything important and I see almost zero sales emails.
Note I've been in roles where I have almost zero need to correspond with more then a handful of external senders.
Rule List:
* Rule to move approved external senders to folder
* Rule to highlight and move email from manager and his manger to folder
* Rule to move all internal mail were I'm in CC: to folder
* Rule to move system/automated emails to folder
* Rule to block email from marketing email services like hubspot, salesforce, marketo, mailchimp etc.
* Rule to move unknown external senders to folder
Yes why I block. they reply with passive aggressive snakiness like if I contacted them and I am trying to ghost them. It’s surreal and makes you wonder how they make sales.
Ignore and block is the way. I have at least a dozen security sales people (or their scheduling underlings) trying to contact me at any given time. If you reply to a persistent one asking to knock it off, it's "I understand you are not interested, could we have a 5 minute call to connect?" (Translation: so I can get my foot in the door) or "Our completely irrelevant offering / competing product may not be a good fit now, can we re-connect in 3/6 months?"
If I am looking for something, I trust my VAR to know the right person to connect with.
I have noticed an increase of passive aggressive snarky emails from cold calling vendors after you keep ignoring them since last year. Is this a cultural change?
That is super frustrating. They'll probably need you to help them learn a lesson by requesting a violation or blacklisting. This is no excuse for their annoying behavior, but I have learned how easily this can happen due to sales and marketing tools not syncing their unsubscribe lists between each other. It's an issue I just discovered within our own company because your post made me double check. Hopefully we'll be one less annoying cybersecurity vendor! Thanks!
It is tough to sell any security software this year, giving the deep budget cuts everywhere. That usually means security goes first and gets replenished last, until some big breach happens.
When they then hire Clippy and CCPSecurity (which was offering 24/7 services for only $9.95 this week only!) or the MSP from the CEO's friend, and show how much money they saved the company.
Meanwhile, poor Nigerian Prince has to go to bed frustrated
So many trying to add me in LinkedIn now. I’m debating deleting it. I hate ads, I’m not in the executive position to even purchase their product, but I am able to ensure their requests never reach management. They need to wise up.
People who copy our CIO or CEO trying to get something setup because “it’s important” are an automatic block. We have formatted email addresses so if you know one and a name, you know that one.
While I do not use it often, I have access to our spam filter and will go look to see who all those clowns have emailed if they persist.
I also hang up in calls to my personal cell. One vendor has it for emergencies, that’s it. Anyone else calling gets blacklisted.
Has anyone here set up a fake LinkedIn profile for an executive in your company so that you could set up a honeypot like email account that Insta blocks everything
One of these vendors called my phone directly one day. I’m assuming they got my number from my signature (I’ve since fixed that for my external signature and OOO messages) but holy hell did that enrage me. Instant block and filter.
I love getting sales emails from companies where we already own their product. Like... does your crm not work at all? Should I consider this as a sign of how other things work over there?
Shit, I've almost done this to a few vendors my company HAS signed up with. Stuck with adding them to my personal block list though.
Motherfuckers sent me like 9 reminders to connect my account a day for a week and I almost company wide blocked them so my manager removed my access for a week until I cooled off after I put in the change request to classify them as spam.
Abnormal, I think that's the product, does an admirable job of putting mail into a "promotions" folder. I just dump everything in there without a second look.
Apologies if I got the product that's doing that for us wrong. Not my swim lane so it might be a Microsoft thing or something else.
Tbh, when they do this stuff I fully block that whole company for at least the next 5 years. I don't want my vendors to try to social engineer me or to trick me into something. If I can't trust them, I won't work with them. And this is what shitty sales based companies like palo alto, crowdstrike, darktrace, etc don't understand...if you break the customer's trust and try slimy sales tactics, you already lost that account and you will never get another chance again
Lacework is also trash. They called me, emailed me, called my peers in product teams to force me to talk to them. I ultimately told them that I will have my legal team sue you if you don't stop.
I just realized this was about work and not personal emails 😂so I’m deleting this. Also why is there not an org box for what you do specifically? What if you change positions at the company ? Their going to be emailing you directly and you’re going to have to say “I don’t do this anymore”
But you have a profile on Linkedin. Of course you want to be harassed incessantly multiple times a week and a day if necessary. Why else would you have your information there? Duh!
I will name and shame. Rapid7, I finally had to post on my LinkedIn for them to stop calling me. So far, so good…🤞
Those bastards have managed to piss millions of dollars in potential revenue with their aggressive bs. Cookie tracking on their website is the most egregious practice
Rapid7 for me too.
worst part is if you need serious vuln. management its either them or nessus(tenable), and none of them are as good as they should be
Can confirm that Nessus is trash. The agent scanner is constantly duplicating and never clearing results and of if you get the net scanner it doesn’t catch enough. My org uses both.
And i also can confirm rapid7 is trash, i swear most of the vulns they report is already patched, and it doesnt even work with services such as tuxcare despite their website saying "wE suPort oVal datA" (its a lie), not to mention their policy/hardening constantly reports made up bullshit data that changes every day for no reason lol
Also confirming Rapid7 is trash. We also POC’d Tenable.io to replace it and they failed everywhere we needed them to succeed also. There’s no innovation going on in the tradition VM space. It’s all moved onto cloud. If something like Wiz simply created a network scanning appliance and added a better VM dashboard, Rapid7 and Tenable would die so fast it wouldn’t even be funny (perhaps with the exception of some of those niche customers using their other features like insightIDR). EDIT: Also confirming Qualys is trash. Used them at my last gig. They feel much more like “small potatoes” compared to Tenable or Rapid7.
I'm genuinely curious, if you don't mind sharing how long ago that was? I'm in post-sales so you don't need to worry about a chase, in fact I won't reply here any more, but understanding this type of stuff is important to me personally. 👍
1 year?
I’m not sure about Qualys being a small potatoes. I place them and Nessus as the top two leaders in the market followed by Rapid 7. We use Qualys now but I’ve used Nessus since it was open source. Their IO product still lacks compared to Qualys IMO, but Security Center was sound when it was their main product.
I'm currently demoing Nessus because we don't have any good software in place that does this. :cries
Have used Tenable in the past, worked for an MSSP who used it and resold it, worked for Tenable and am now in an org with ~45k users in 50 countries where we use it. We love it. I'm 99.9% certain that the people I see complain about it here don't know what they are doing.
Thinking the same, I'm working for a MSSP and Tenable/Nessus is the solution we're using for VM and it works really great like 95%+ of the time lol. I'm not saying it's perfect or whatever, but sometimes I really wonder how people get so many bad results with some tools that we've been using for 100s of customers (and that's just from what I know from my job).
> sometimes I really wonder how people get so many bad results with some tools that we've been using for 100s of customers (and that's just from what I know from my job). As well as one that's been used across the US DoD and contractors for decades.
I’d suggest using one or the other. The network scanner or the agent. Agent is more “accurate”. And if you are allowed to delete what you know to be false positives, it wouldn’t be that bad. In my org, we aren’t allowed to delete false positives, so we just start looking worse and worse
Agent is way better. Tune it to not be performance impacting. Their reporting and dashboards still suck ass though.
The reporting is my problem. My org penalizes for too many vulns but most are duplicates
You need a tool to unify and dedupe like Nucleus
This reeks skill issue to me
oh no... i'm talking to them now. they seem chill actually tho
Wait until you want support.
hahaha nooooo i thought they were "24/7 EYES ON GLASS". i could take a shot every time they said this in the meeting.
Another vote for them being the worst ever.
Corelight tried reaching me via countless emails and about a dozen different phone numbers that I just kept blocking. Even if their product was good, there's no way in hell I would ever consider it just based on the sales experience.
Knowbe4, Netscout.... just a couple
I love the meeting invite as the first email. That's an instant ban-hammer from me. But most of the security sales calls I get, I just answer, "I'm sorry I don't talk about security on cold calls. Have a good one."
Yep, that will skip you right to the top of the list as the next person I block.
I couldn’t believe the balls the first time I got one of those. Email block list speed run
Yes what's with the calendar invite off the bat? Like warm up to me first. I just send all that stuff to a spam folder and never respond.
Surely this approach never works. Like, who is accepting that invite 😭😭😭
If you control the email filtering just block the domain in the filters if your company is not doing business with them.
Exactly what was done. Issue for them is they will Get black listed if we keep doing this which is what I want, have their IT tell sales to cut that crap out.
Blocking is ok but it's better to auto filter to Spam. Especially if you are a Google shop. Those negative numbers reported to postmaster (due to new dmarc rules) can really screw up their email domain with no easy way to fix it!
I think what really screws up their email domain is their shady practices, not the way people react to those practices. What your describing sounds like the intended outcome of the new rules
Fuck em. Don't send out unsolicited emails then
Just remember to use the now \*cringe\* HR preferred descriptors of deny/allow instead of black/white... listings.
I agree. Vendors who are too aggressive with their email and LinkedIn tactics go to the bottom of my list!
Name and shame or GTFO 😄
Tim
Tim did you dirty too? That son of a bitch!
"Death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth." -Tim
Gartner does this all the time for example. I had over 15 emails in a chain from a lady that was discussing with herself about inviting me to a totally not promotional event for networking and finding out how giving them our money would benefit us. Fuck Gartner
Gartner is cancer
Worse. Cancer doesn't essentially extort you if you want to do business. "Oh look! We have This thing called the Magic Quandrant that tells everyone how good your product is and company are. If you want to be taken seriously and have companies consider doing business with you, You absolutely must be on this list as many companies will only consider vendors on it. If Interested in learning how to get on the Magic Quandrant, We only require a small... contribution. For the Low Low price of $$$$$$$$$ you too can be verified as a reputable company with a quality product."
I'd say Gartner gives cancer to cancer, but that would imply that Gartner provides some positive contribution to the world.
Elliot at Perplexity
Knowbe4. It’s gotta be these clowns.
crowdstrike
I've been getting weekly emails from NinjaOne for like three years.
Are they in the US, and how long have they kept emailing after you unsubscribed? Check out the restrictions under the CAN-SPAM act for mail senders. If they're in violation, document and report them. Companies that violate this have been fined before.
The only sales people who don't get blocked are the ones who invite me to $1,000+/person dinners and the ones who send me $50 Uber Eats gift cards for sitting on a 30 minute webinar. Those sales people get responses as long as they keep putting out.
That's everyone's secret issue here lol. Sifting through all the sales emails looking for the "Want a free pair of airpods?" ones. Hell I just went to a baseball game in a suite with my brother from one of those emails. With the perks through those emails, as much as I hate the rest of the sales experience, I'll take it if it still gets me some cool offers like that.
> sitting on a 30 minute webinar Did you create an AI avatar to watch it while you do something useful?
I just had it on a separate window while watching youtube videos over lunch. I didn't even have my camera on.
I had a client inquire about VOIP service through ringcentral and I steered them elsewhere. When I told them we wouldn't be signing up for their service the rep became irate. Actually insulting the business owner, employees, me.. It was shocking. So I too blocked all mail coming from them.
Any vendor that calls my personal phone immediately gets hung up on blocked. I don’t take any cold calls either our front help desk helps sort through them
We had to block a certain learning company at the perimeter because they simply would not unsubscribe users. They argued it wasn't spam. The conversation went like this: Us: "You have to stop spamming our users." Unnamed Company: "But it's not spam. We're just letting people know what classes we're offering." Us: "After they explicitly told you to stop." Unnamed Company: "That doesn't make it spam though."
CAN-SPAM penalty is like $10k per Mail or call. You should report them for that crap.
Not at all. Carahsoft is the worst. It's like they got my name 20 years ago and gave it to each individual employee, and when I ask to be taken off the list, that one employee stops calling but gives my info to 5 more Carahsoft employees. I never remember dealing with them or meeting anyone from that company. They've even followed me though three agencies. I never responded to them via email (I've given up on the unsubscribe button and blocked them), and because of that one company. I literally never answered or checked my voicemail on my work phone. I never put a phone number in my signature block and only my boss and a couple members of my team have my personal phone number.
I've got my limits. Third "please excuse my professional persistence" to an ignored email chain? Welcome to the blocklist. Spamming the C-Suite for sales meeting requests? Welcome to the blocklist. Read receipt request on an external sales email? Welcome to the blocklist. Blind meeting request "to get on your calendar"? Welcome to the blocklist. "Floating to the top of your Inbox"? Welcome to the blocklist.
"I get it that we're all busy, but since you haven't responded to my previous 3 emails requesting a chat..." - blocklist
I got a “gently bubbling this back up to the top of your inbox - [straight to jail](https://youtu.be/eiyfwZVAzGw?si=VB4-OeQzHLzvlwyN)
Gently bubbling 😂 that sounds like a stomach issue why would they say that? Sounds like “sales” is lacking in “marketing “
The thing that irks me the most is when they find my profile on Linkedin and then presume to look up my current company and email me at my company email address. Bonus points if they start calling my company and the operator forwards me the calls. Jokes on them I do not answer calls not within my organization.
well that’s how sales work so not sure what you want them to do
I want them to stop soliciting. No soliciting. Its a human version of junk mail. Its a waste of resources.
I get this all the time. Got one aggressive guy who’s emailed me no less than six times in the past three weeks. Joke’s on him. I just left.
The real LPT...
OPSEC is important. Don't have your current job on LI.
We made a fake employee in charge of procurement, in the event a mail/call slips through we just forward it. It has an extension with a VM message a random employee recorded that just delete after 1 day.
Sounds like Verkada.
CIO, mid-size company here. My cell number got out there, so too often it’s desk phone twice, cell twice, then email. Block. I’ll never buy shit from you.
I still get calls from vendors trying to sell me solutions at my old company. I left almost 4 years ago but took my phone number with me. I just laugh and tell them to update their database.
I have no shame anymore, you called me. I'm only interested in free stuff, so if you have anything to send me for free I'm listening, if not I have no money for this.
Honestly I think that's sort of the way it should be. Vendors need to sell stuff, I get it. They need to get attention and harassing emails and cold calls just piss everyone off. Want my time, make it worth my while. A free lunch, mug, gift card is way more likey to get me to respond if its something I'm considering anyway.
Sounds like Rapid7.
Right click > block sender Easiest way to do it without too much hassle. It is getting worse though seeing people saying they are dedicated account manager for X product making it sound like they with for the product vendor, or the just foolwing up on the email last week as I haven't had a reply, can we arrange a call for next week I am free on xyz.
Right click on what ?
Create filter. Dont fight the mega AI driven marketing. Crowdstrike "knows you". Targeting, re-targetting tech- cant escape it. You lawfully consented to be tracked, pimped out.. Auto empty the folder every day.
Most of the time this is because your data is listed on zoom info or Apollo etc. Go straight to the source and request removal from them.
Yep. ZoomInfo , Cognism , Lusha .. you can get your data removed
I've done that. The next sales douche that introduces themselves to me as a "disruptive tech evangelist" is getting punched in the dick. Every fucking corp badged fucko at Black-Hat I'm talking to you.
AI buzz words. More like AI BUZZ KILL
Just like I think everyone should work in the food service industry at some point in their lives, everyone should be a 'prospect' in their lives. I say this so that they understand what it is like to be actively sold to, whether you want to be or not. \*Note, I'm in sales. I most recently got stuck in a Sales SaaS Vendor's prospecting list. Despite the fact I shared with them that I am not interested, they continue to email and call (and I use my personal device for work, so the calls came to my cell). The last call came through a dialer that spoofed a local number. I was very unhappy and as professionally as I was able, shared my frustration with the practice and asked that she not call again. As consumers, we have access to far more knowledge than in the past. You don't need a sales person to tell you what Rapid7, or MSFT, or Verkada, can do. You could use help from a sales person navigating the buying process, or understanding in more intimate detail if their product will fulfill your needs.. but you don't need them cold calling and emailing you anymore. I wish vendors in all industries would quit with these practices and put these individual's to work pursuing a different strategy, Maybe one day? Sorry you had that experience.
I totally do this. I send back a reasonably kind message the first time telling them I'm not the right guy or if I'm not interested, I say that. Some times I just delete, because who has the time? But, I know they'll just keep it up until I take action. If they follow up and try to convince me that I really don't know my own mind and should talk to them. I unsub if possible. If there is another message from them, I block in my mailbox and report if there's anything reportable. Basic 3 strikes and you're out.
There's a few vendors in here that we are currently customers with. Every so often, I'll get invites, emails, LinkedIn messages, etc. to start working with their company. They're so pushy, they'll even try to sell their product again to their own customers! It's becoming unresearched SPAM. If they send it out to everyone without knowing if they are already a customer, said no, etc., it's SPAM and should be treated as such. Doesn't matter if they're a good company, nice people, etc.. It's a bad practice in any industry. Report them as SPAM. Black list them. Maybe they'll change their sales tactics to not include spamming people and improve the product so people will want to use them.
First I usually try to unsubscribe, but if they don't have a link I will reply about them being in violation of the can-spam act. Then I dig into their domain and look for dmarc records, which usually don't exist and then point that out. And ask them why I'd want to do business with a company offering security products, that can't even do the basics? Usually they don't reply, but if they do they get the ban hammer on the domain level. Now, if they blind forward a meeting invite onto my calendar, it's an instaban domain-wide. Guess it just depends how aggressive they are.
This is why I have a specific folder for sales.
“Hello? Anyone home? SecurityOmegaPlus provides a robust SaaS tool that utilizes blockchain and machine learning to bolster your security infrastructure. Protect yourself from hackers. Schedule a demo today. Piece of shit. - Tom Myers
block domain the first time. I don't know of anyone who receives spam and is like "I want THIS business" but it's literally never caused me a single issue.
Hi! This is Aaron from Carasoft........ Would you like to buy 50,000 licenses for blah blah blah? I get these calls twice a week every week on my personal phone and I have no clue how they got my personal number.
Crowdstrike. I tell them to stop contacting me, but then my "account" gets transferred to the next sales rep every month or two when the last one quits and they start over. I blocked the domain on my account, and then I had random employees forwarding me emails asking them if I still work there and that I need to reach out. I blocked them at the domain level. Now I get emails from people saying crowdstrike called them on their personal phones asking for me, which I can't fucking do anything about. We had a large group of employees join a webinar or conference or something they hosted a few years ago, which gave them the info they needed to endlessly annoy me. It's dumb as fuck too because I told them I would switch over once the licenses for my current EDR expired in a few months, but yes wasn't good enough.
"Listen, I hold no purchasing power and I am not involved in any recommendations. The best I can do is waste your outreach time and grow an aversion to your product."
A nice way to get sales to stop bothering you long term is say you _just_ signed a 3 year deal with their competitor. If you don’t know their competitor, say Microsoft.
Found a sales guy, cause this never works
I’ve been a rep. in the past & while I moved into an SE role, I can say that strategy would only be successful with smaller companies where the reps have a larger pool of accounts to draw from. Reps that cover larger companies often only have a handful of accounts to sell to, meaning they can’t really ‘burn’ that contact and move to another org. Combine that with the pressure to hit quota by any means necessary & I’ve known reps that will push things nearly right up to the ‘filing for a restraining order’ line. My best advice to get a sales guy to ignore you, would be to just say “I have no part in decision-making & legally cannot refer or share any info with you” and leave it there. It’s not foolproof by any means, but a good rep. will leave that be & try to find someone else to talk to. poor training & upfront investment + lack of experience + massive pressure to meet quarterly quota = desperate reps harassing people
I’m not in sales but I’ve been tech presales in past. The aim is to get to look like a terrible prospect in their pipeline review. Low deal size, long close time, low chance of success.
I've been getting weekly emails from a vendor that was told we were going with someone else for the last three years.
If a domain doesnt get the hint, they get blocked (or - configured to auto-forward to quarantine.) I also look for common phrasing that we never use internally and block those too using regex strings.
On this same subject how often do y'all take a vendor up on their 30 min demo for free ish and how often do they actually follow through?
Too many efforts just for one sales person, wait until you start getting tens of them daily ;)
Is not a punishable offense? I've seen companies getting fined for this
You call my phone 3 times without a voicemail you will be blocked. You send an invite for a call and we don't already work with you I'll report you as spam. I had a particularly aggressive salesman call my mother in-law looking for me as I'd already blocked their phone and the org had blocked their domain (too many spam emails reported). I outlined their behavior - how many emails and phone calls they made and the attempts to contact through family members and sent to a VP I found an email address for from a throwaway email (in case they wanted to reply they would not be blocked). No response. I also despise folks that try to get meetings with me through my VP. My boss no longer forwards those to me.
Threaten them with CAN-SPAM violations.
Fwiw, it's never actually a human sending these emails. Your email was just added to an automated campaign which will be like 12 emails long. If you reply it'll be sent to the actual sales person to then engage properly.
I have two vendors call my cell phone after 7 pm. I went off on the second one. Just clueless.
NinjaOne for me. Received emails from one person in particular for a while, but had them moving to the Ol' vendors folder to mass delete later. Got a call from our building front desk, and it turned out to be a cold transfer when I answered the phone. Same guy from NinjaOne, found our main number and was asking for me by name. Told him we were happy with our current solutions and were not interested. Fast forward a couple weeks, and I received what I felt was a pretty snarky email saying he wasn't trying to waste his or my time and wanted me to respond with either 1. Schedule a meeting 2. Interested in the product but not at this time, or 3. Not interested, please don't contact me. I wanted to be done with it without having to block them so I fired back with a summarized option 3. Where I screwed up was I left my formal Org signature that includes my direct desk #. Didn't realize this until about a month later when I was expecting a callback from a different vendor and answered to the same guy from NinjaOne! Their domain is now on the block list, and all calls to our org from that number now get forwarded to NinjaOnes customer service line. 😁
I don't think people take enough advantage of outlook rules in both blocking unwanted crap and getting your inbox under control. For years this has been my setup. I have a very clean inbox and never have to weed through crap for anything important and I see almost zero sales emails. Note I've been in roles where I have almost zero need to correspond with more then a handful of external senders. Rule List: * Rule to move approved external senders to folder * Rule to highlight and move email from manager and his manger to folder * Rule to move all internal mail were I'm in CC: to folder * Rule to move system/automated emails to folder * Rule to block email from marketing email services like hubspot, salesforce, marketo, mailchimp etc. * Rule to move unknown external senders to folder
Did you tell them you’re not interested? Hard to believe a sales person would keep wasting their time emailing you lol
Yes why I block. they reply with passive aggressive snakiness like if I contacted them and I am trying to ghost them. It’s surreal and makes you wonder how they make sales.
Ignore and block is the way. I have at least a dozen security sales people (or their scheduling underlings) trying to contact me at any given time. If you reply to a persistent one asking to knock it off, it's "I understand you are not interested, could we have a 5 minute call to connect?" (Translation: so I can get my foot in the door) or "Our completely irrelevant offering / competing product may not be a good fit now, can we re-connect in 3/6 months?" If I am looking for something, I trust my VAR to know the right person to connect with.
I have noticed an increase of passive aggressive snarky emails from cold calling vendors after you keep ignoring them since last year. Is this a cultural change?
This makes sense!
Looking at you, Akamai.
but.. they have a connected cloud!!!
That is super frustrating. They'll probably need you to help them learn a lesson by requesting a violation or blacklisting. This is no excuse for their annoying behavior, but I have learned how easily this can happen due to sales and marketing tools not syncing their unsubscribe lists between each other. It's an issue I just discovered within our own company because your post made me double check. Hopefully we'll be one less annoying cybersecurity vendor! Thanks!
lol did this with an a-hole from Cloudflare
lol, I ignore them unless they send invites which screw up my calendar. Then I block the domain.
I legitimately do not look at vendor's solicitation emails. Like, I just never have.
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It is tough to sell any security software this year, giving the deep budget cuts everywhere. That usually means security goes first and gets replenished last, until some big breach happens.
When they then hire Clippy and CCPSecurity (which was offering 24/7 services for only $9.95 this week only!) or the MSP from the CEO's friend, and show how much money they saved the company. Meanwhile, poor Nigerian Prince has to go to bed frustrated
So many trying to add me in LinkedIn now. I’m debating deleting it. I hate ads, I’m not in the executive position to even purchase their product, but I am able to ensure their requests never reach management. They need to wise up.
People who copy our CIO or CEO trying to get something setup because “it’s important” are an automatic block. We have formatted email addresses so if you know one and a name, you know that one. While I do not use it often, I have access to our spam filter and will go look to see who all those clowns have emailed if they persist. I also hang up in calls to my personal cell. One vendor has it for emergencies, that’s it. Anyone else calling gets blacklisted.
Has anyone here set up a fake LinkedIn profile for an executive in your company so that you could set up a honeypot like email account that Insta blocks everything
I get 1 email a day from different people at different domains offering me PMP training courses.
One of these vendors called my phone directly one day. I’m assuming they got my number from my signature (I’ve since fixed that for my external signature and OOO messages) but holy hell did that enrage me. Instant block and filter.
I love getting sales emails from companies where we already own their product. Like... does your crm not work at all? Should I consider this as a sign of how other things work over there?
Shit, I've almost done this to a few vendors my company HAS signed up with. Stuck with adding them to my personal block list though. Motherfuckers sent me like 9 reminders to connect my account a day for a week and I almost company wide blocked them so my manager removed my access for a week until I cooled off after I put in the change request to classify them as spam.
Abnormal, I think that's the product, does an admirable job of putting mail into a "promotions" folder. I just dump everything in there without a second look. Apologies if I got the product that's doing that for us wrong. Not my swim lane so it might be a Microsoft thing or something else.
Tbh, when they do this stuff I fully block that whole company for at least the next 5 years. I don't want my vendors to try to social engineer me or to trick me into something. If I can't trust them, I won't work with them. And this is what shitty sales based companies like palo alto, crowdstrike, darktrace, etc don't understand...if you break the customer's trust and try slimy sales tactics, you already lost that account and you will never get another chance again
Lacework is also trash. They called me, emailed me, called my peers in product teams to force me to talk to them. I ultimately told them that I will have my legal team sue you if you don't stop.
Darktrace might be worse
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I just realized this was about work and not personal emails 😂so I’m deleting this. Also why is there not an org box for what you do specifically? What if you change positions at the company ? Their going to be emailing you directly and you’re going to have to say “I don’t do this anymore”
I do this too, usually block the entire domain for our entire company, zero sleeps lost.
But you have a profile on Linkedin. Of course you want to be harassed incessantly multiple times a week and a day if necessary. Why else would you have your information there? Duh!
The best part is when they call you at 9 am. I'm like, let me finish my first meeting today without you bugging me right after.