Here lately, my inbox has been inundated with emails referencing wanting to send me, rather my company, business if I would click a link and join Alignable.com.
As I would soon come to learn, Alignable.com is a small business networking website acting as a path to customer referrals, recommendations, and local business insights.
I ignored the first couple of emails until I began receiving the same emails from well known domainers.
My latest email supposedly arrived from Jamie Zoch, publisher of DotWeekly.com and longtime Domain Specialist, Consultant and Broker.
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I know of Jamie, but don’t necessarily KNOW Jamie. Having received Jamie’s Alignable email invite, I became a bit more curious about whether or not the invite was legit.
Could this invite be a phishing email?
Even when I hovered over the email link, I copied the link address and pasted it into a text file to discover alignable.com as the url.
A typical phishing email often uses a non .com domain that’s misspelled or a random domain with nothing to do with the subject at hand.
However, as a one word .com domain, Alignable.com sound credible and looks professional as a brand.
But again, was this email legit? That was the question of the moment.
I certainly wasn’t going to click it to find out. I may have been born at night, but it certainly wasn’t last night. 😀
It was time for a bit of research. One of the first things I did was to Google Alignable.
And just as I was about to hit the enter key, up pops “alignable spam”. As Scooby would say… “Ruh Roh!”
A number of results were returned as shown below. I visited the first link, but it was nothing truly worth reading.
Then, I noticed and read the 6th result: Are Your Contacts Being Careless With Your LinkedIn Information?
It was a very good read and I felt somewhat at ease knowing Alignable didn’t appear to be a fly-by-night company. In fact, it appears that it *could* be a tool for domainers to find a target audience.
Nevertheless, reading the last article reminded me Jamie and I are connected via LinkedIn. Instead of reaching out to Jamie via LinkedIn, I did the next best thing to get to the bottom of this pressing matter of curiosity: used Twitter.
But just as I was about to to search and Tweet Jamie, I encountered the following tweet from Mike Sullivan, founder of SullysBlog.com.
I'm getting invites from several domainers from https://t.co/VtPIdq0XWN. Is this legit?
— Mike Sullivan (@Sullys_Blog) January 16, 2018
And seeing a few other domain industry folks received the same type of email invites, I simply had to get to the bottom of this matter.
Fortunately, I was able to contact Jamie to find out the Alignable.com invite was legit. Whew… But that’s not to say that ALL invites are legit.
Regardless of where the email comes from, especially if received from a service like Alignable.com or something similar, I encourage and recommend contacting the person that sent you an invite by email, phone, or social media BEFORE blindly clicking a link.
With the number of malware and ransomware attacks happening daily, you’re better safe to check and validate than be sorry due to a seemingly minor negligent act.
Nevertheless, Alignable.com seems to be a tool worth checking out should your focus be to garner the attention of small business owners.
