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.