Who are you and why are you mailing me?

I’ve mentioned here before that I use tagged addresses whenever I sign up for. This does help me mentally sort out what’s real spam and what’s just mail I’ve forgotten I’ve signed up for.
Yesterday, I received and email from e-fense.com thanking me for my interest in their new product. The mail came to a tagged address, but not a tag that I would have given to e-fense.com. Their opening paragraph said:

First of all, thank you for your interest regarding e-fense and our family of products…

The family of products in question appears to be security and forensics tools. Not something I would sign up to receive information about. The tagged email address points to the eventbee.com website. I don’t have any other email to the address I gave to eventbee. So I’m not sure who this company is or why they think I signed up to receive mail from them.
In all likelihood  this is just some marketer being stupid. I vaguely remember signing up for something at eventbee recently, although I don’t remember what it is, or if e-fense was related to it. After a little investigation, I come to the conclusion this is a stupid marketer that has access to event signup data and added all those email addresses to their mailing list.
I’m willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt so instead of sending a complaint or anything I decide to send them email. I notice the first problem: the visible email address in the footer has a different email address in the mailto: link. I decide to send my question to both addresses, just to be sure it gets to someone who can answer my question. I sent:

Can you tell me what your connection to eventbee is and where you got the email address laura-eventbeeCF at mydomain.com

I discover a second problem. The address in the mailto: link doesn’t exist. The other address seems to have delivered, but I have yet to receive a response from Mr. Vinall. That’s OK, I wasn’t necessarily expecting a response right away.
Then today, I discovered a third problem. They’ve moved to an ESP and are sending out more marketing mail. Daily mail from a sender I never subscribed to? Not good. Daily mail from a sender I never requested email from claiming I signed up to their list? Even worse. I’ve dropped an email to abuse@ the ESP and already gotten a reply. If they are enforcing their policies as their response to me says, then I expect not to hear from them again.
I’ve been around long enough, and I’m willing to cut both the company and the ESP a little slack. But, most normal people would have hit “this is spam” when receiving this mail. In fact, I say email that starts with “thank you for your interest” in a product I’ve never heard of from a company I don’t recognize is clearly spam.
Could this have been handled better? Absolutely.
How would I advise a client to do this better?
Send a shorter email introducing your company to the recipient, tell them why they’re receiving this email and offer them the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletters.

Hi, this is e-fense. You recently signed up for an event at the santa clara convention center. We’d like the opportunity to introduce our products and our company to you. We offer product that does insert product functionality here. If you’d like more information about our company, please visit our website at URL here. If you would like to receive our newsletters in the future please click here to subscribe.

See? Now I know why you’re emailing me. I can look at your product, I can visit your website. I can subscribe to receive your newsletter. Sure, some people might still report the mail as spam, but a lot fewer people will do it now than when you started off unexpected, unwanted and unasked for email with “thank you for your interest in our product…”

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Registration is not permission

“But we only mail people who registered at our website! How can they say we’re spamming?”
In those cases where website registration includes notice that the recipient will be added to a list, and / or the recipient receives an email informing them of the type of email they have agreed to receive there is some permission involved. Without any notice, however, there is no permission. Senders must tell the recipient they should expect to receive mail at the time of registration (or shortly thereafter) otherwise there is not even any pretense of opt-in associated with that registration.
Take, for example, a photographers website. The photographer took photos at a friend’s wedding and put them up on a website for the friend and guests to see. Guests were able to purchase photos directly from the site, if they so desired. In order to control access, the photographer required users to register on the site, including an email address.
None of this is bad. It’s all standard and reasonably good practice.
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This is a post I’ve put off for a while as the definition of spam is a sticky subject. There are online fora where the definition of spam has been debated for more than 10 years, and if there isn’t a working definition after all that time, it’s unlikely there will ever be a definition the participants can agree on.
This came up again recently because one of the comments on my “Reputation is not permission” post took me to task for daring to call the mail “spam.” I’m going to assert here that the mail was unsolicited bulk email. I did not ask for it and I know at least 4 other people that received it.
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Here are 10 of the many definitions of spam that I’ve seen.

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What happens when marketers fail to be able to suppress email addresses? At some point they’re going to mail someone who gets annoyed enough with them to make it public that they are too incompetent to run an email program.
This happened to the folks over at spamfighter.com recently. They have been spamming Neil Schwartzman (spamfighter, Executive director of CAUCE North America, Director of Standards and Certification at ReturnPath) since somewhere in 2007. Yes, really, 2007. Neil has asked them politely to stop spamming him. He’s explained he’s not actually using their software. They appear to be incapable of running a suppression list, despite telling him 3 times that they have removed his address.
Showing much more restraint than I would have with a sender who couldn’t stop sending me email, Neil gave them years to fix their process before blogging about his experiences. Instead of fixing their broken process they instead responded to his blog post insisting their mail wasn’t spam because they weren’t sending Viagra mail or 3rd party offers.
We can argue about the definition of opt-in, we can argue about whether registration is permission, we can argue about a lot of things, but when the recipients says “stop sending me email” and a sender says “we’ll stop sending you email” and then fails to actually stop sending email I think the recipient is fully justified in calling the email spam. Sorry spamfighter.com, your process is broken and your inability to fix it 2 years after the brokenness was brought to your attention does not give anyone a good impression.
Every email sender should have the ability to stop sending mail to recipients. If that’s not currently possible with your technology, it should be a very high development priority.

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