Garbage in… garbage out

Ken Magill (hereafter known as Mr. Stupid Poopypants) has a follow up article today on his article from last week about the Obama campaign’s mailing practices. While poking Dylan a bit, his message is that marketers really need to look harder at double opt-in.

All these things can and do go wrong with double opt-in, but the risks of not using it have simply become too great. For one thing, if a marketer gets blacklisted by, say, Spamhaus, and the mailer is not using double opt-in, the folks at Spamhaus will force the issue.
On the plus side, marketers using double opt-in don’t get blacklisted by Spamhaus because they never hit Spamhaus’s traps—fake e-mail addresses set up to catch spammers.
Also, fake signups are nothing to get worked up about. They are simply a fact of e-mail list building that the marketer must guard against or accept the inevitable consequences. It is solely up to mailers to keep their lists clean, and no one else.

Data verification is a necessary and critical bit of email marketing on today’s internet. For many marketers, the only solution may be to move to double opt-in.

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Yahoo and Spamhaus

Yahoo has updated and modified their postmaster pages. They have also put a lot of work into clarifying their response codes. The changes should help senders identify and troubleshoot problems without relying on individual help from Yahoo.
There is one major change that deserves its own discussion. Yahoo is now using the SBL, XBL and PBL to block connections from listed IP addresses. These are public blocklists run by Spamhaus. Each of them targets a different type of spam source.
The SBL is the blocklist that addresses fixed spam sources. To get listed on the SBL, a sender is sending email to people who have never requested it. Typically, this involves email sent to an address that has not opted in to the email. These addresses, known as spamtraps, are used as sentinel addresses. Any mail sent to them is, by definition, not opt-in. These addresses are never signed up to any email address lists by the person who owns the email address. Spamtraps can get onto a mailing list in a number of different ways, but none of them involve the owner of the address giving the sender permission to email them.
Additionally, the SBL will list spam gangs and spam supporters. Spam supporters include networks that provide services to spammers and do not take prompt action to remove the spammers from their services.
The XBL is a list of IP addresses which appear to be infected with trojans or spamware or can be used by hackers to send spam (open proxies or open relays). This list includes both the CBL and the NJABL open proxy list. The CBL list machines which appear to be infected with spamware or trojans. The CBL works passively, looking only at those machines which actively make connections to CBL detectors. NJABL lists machines that are open proxies and open relays.
The Policy Block List (PBL) is Spamhaus’ newest list. Spamhaus describes this list as

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Spamfilters are stupid

Ben over at MailChimp writes about spamfilters that are following links in emails resulting in people being unsubscribed from lists without their knowledge. I strongly suggest clients use a 2 step unsubscribe system, that does not require any passwords or information. The recipient clicks on a link in the email and confirms that they do want to be unsubscribed once they get to the unsubscribe webpage.
Even more concerning for me is the idea that people could be subscribed to emails without their knowledge. For some subset of lists, using confirmed (double) opt-in is the best way to make sure that the sender really has permission from the recipient. Now we have a spam filter that is rendering “click here to opt-in” completely useless. I am sure there are ways to compensate for the stupidity of filters. As usual, though, the spammers are doing things which push more work off onto the end user and the legitimate mailers.

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Data Integrity, part 2

Yesterday I blogged about eROIs contention that consumers should not be wasting the time of lead gen companies by filling in fake data. There were lots of good comments on the post, and I strongly encourage you to go read them if you are interested in different perspectives on the data issue.
One of the arguments I was making is that people are only going to give accurate information if they trust the website that is collecting information. I do, strongly, believe this. I also believe very strongly that websites collecting information need to do so defensively. It is the only way you can get good information.
This ties in with an earlier post about a website that collects email addresses from any visitor, then turns around and submits those addresses to webforms. Hundreds of mailing lists have already been corrupted by this group. They are a prime reason companies must design address collection process defensively. There are people who do bad things, who will take an opportunity to harass senders and recipients. This company is not the first, nor will they be the last to commit such abuses.
Taking a stand against abusive companies and people may be useful, but that will not stop the abuse. It is much easier to design process that limits the amount of abuse. For lead gen, in particular, confirmed opt-in is one way to limit the amount of bad data collected. As a side effect, it also results in less blocked mail, fewer complaints and better delivery.

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