Off Topic - Marketing spam - Veeam utilizing data scraping?

[JRRW]

This is a bit off topic from the actual product, but I wanted to get the communities feelings on this. Who knows, maybe I'm over reacting and this is more normal and accepted by our industry than I would expect.


The issue: I saw a marketing Veeam email hit my spam quarentine, so I wanted to dig in and see why it was blocked, only to find out it went to a LOT of people in my organization, many of whom are not even in the IT department. So I dug further to see how wide spread it was and over the last month saw this:

Code: Select all

Timestamp (UTC)	Series name	Count
2024-08-28T00:00:00Z	Delivered	4
2024-08-28T00:00:00Z	Delivered to deleted folder	1
2024-08-28T00:00:00Z	Delivered to junk	1
2024-08-29T00:00:00Z	Delivered	1
2024-08-30T00:00:00Z	Delivered	1
2024-09-03T00:00:00Z	Delivered	2
2024-09-04T00:00:00Z	Delivered	5
2024-09-04T00:00:00Z	Delivered to deleted folder	1
2024-09-04T00:00:00Z	Blocked	11
2024-09-05T00:00:00Z	Delivered	14
2024-09-05T00:00:00Z	Delivered to deleted folder	1
2024-09-05T00:00:00Z	Delivered to junk	2
2024-09-09T00:00:00Z	Delivered	4
2024-09-09T00:00:00Z	Delivered to deleted folder	1
2024-09-10T00:00:00Z	Delivered	15
2024-09-10T00:00:00Z	Delivered to deleted folder	1
2024-09-10T00:00:00Z	Delivered to junk	2
2024-09-12T00:00:00Z	Delivered	2
2024-09-13T00:00:00Z	Delivered	10
2024-09-13T00:00:00Z	Delivered to junk	2
2024-09-18T00:00:00Z	Delivered to junk	1
2024-09-19T00:00:00Z	Delivered	1
2024-09-20T00:00:00Z	Delivered	15
2024-09-20T00:00:00Z	Delivered to junk	2
2024-09-24T00:00:00Z	Delivered	4
2024-09-24T00:00:00Z	Delivered to junk	2
2024-09-24T00:00:00Z	Blocked	18

What this tells me is that - as I am 99% sure the majority of these users have never interacted with Veeam nor would they have signed up for webinars etc - that Veeam is in some fashion scraping company data / LinkedIn or potentially even paying for data aggregation services to spam their marketing.

Further, the blocked reasoning was High likelihood spam by our product (it didn't even make it to Abnormal, but rather was stopped by Exchange Online Protection, oddly enough).

We're a long time customer of Veeam, and I'm an even longer overall customer having worked with the product since the early days, but this to me is a breach of trust I have with a company that is focused on data protection. Can anyone else check their systems to see if we're a fluke case, or if Veeam is potentially spamming our organizations outside of the individuals responsible for Enterprise Backup?

I think that last is the worst for me - we're a known customer with a named account representative and specific users in Veeam's CRM - so why are they spamming up to a dozen other individuals who have no bearing whatsoever on IT. Even if they somehow got this data by legitimate ways - i.e. all of these users signed up for a Veeam seminar, which I HIGHLY doubt is the case given I see "Account Manager" and "Mechanical Engineer" among the titles of users blasted by these emails - the bottom line is that Veeam should know that our organization has at most 5 individuals responsible for / have access to Veeam, and those are the users they should be targeting.

This hits me particularly hard as we are striving so hard to win the game of whack-a-mole that is ShadowIT, and this sort of behavior is exactly what feeds it - when people outside of the decision making and service owners get some block headed idea that 'we need this!' or worse, 'well why aren't you doing this!?' which at best wastes our time having to explain our decisions to people who don't get it anyways (eroding trust in IT) and at worst opens the door to potential back door utilization of systems/products that are not approved..

I know that VeeamOn is 70% marketing and 30% engineering, at best, and I know that Marketing teams need to break into new markets and new clients through cold calling and such - but using the 'spray and pray' approach is ill-conceived and looks desperate.

If anyone from Veeam wants to Chime in, I'm all ears - and if this is news to people at Veeam, I'd sure as heck ring some bells up the chain on what happened to Veeam's customer focused approach. Who are you, Broadcom Symantec? Because, this is what I'd expect from Symantec/CA type bottom feeder IT software providers who don't have a good enough product or customer support to sell their product so rely on questionable marketing techniques.

[d.artzen]

I don't see this in our company. I have checked our mail logs from the last two weeks, because I was curios. The only mails from Veeam that we got were ones from this forum, which were only send to my personal mail address, and the regular marketing mails which all were send to our registered mail address (which is the one where the licenses are also registered to). No other mails I can see from Veeam.
Granted we are only a small company and don't have many licenses and only one registered account for the product, but in our case only the desired recipients get any mail from Veeam.

[Gostev]

This is a bit off topic from the actual product

Not "a little" off-topic but rather "complete" off-topic for this community no relevance to the product or Veeam R&D whatsoever

If you want the responsible marketing VP to review your situation in details, you can send feedback to them directly using the Veeam Feedback Form at vee.am/feedback. I assume they should have a history of obtaining each email address because normally all activities/interactions like product or whitepaper download, webinar registrations etc. should be registered in the sales database (aka user journey).

If you just want to chat about this with other users, please use community.veeam.com which was created some years ago specifically to provide a place for users to discuss random topics, when this community started to become too busy for the PM team to handle.

[JRRW]

As always Gostev, you have literally the perfect answer.

I wasn't even aware the community.veeam.com was a thing - but I will for sure check it out as well as the vee.am/feedback option (amusing anecdote, as i typed that, i naturally typed /feedbackup instead of /feedback).

I truly hope this is an isolated occurrence, because as I said, this isn't what I have come to expect from Veeam. Tons of vendors at VeeamON and a push for new Veeam product usage? Sure, that's natural =D