The myth of the low complaint rate

I have been reading the complaints filed by Holomaxx and will have some analysis and information about them probably Monday or Tuesday next week. I’ve been keeping an eye on the press and something that Ken Magill said caught my eye.

Specifically, HolomaXx alleges, its Microsoft complaint rates have been consistently at or below 0.5 percent and its Yahoo complaint rates have been at or below 0.1 percent.
Spam-complaint rates are a significant metric ISPs use to determine if incoming email is wanted by recipients or not.

This is not exactly true. Sender who have mail blocked at the edge or filtered into the bulk folder have extremely low complaint rates.
I’ll say it again, because it is critically important to understand.
Bad senders who do not get email to the inbox have very low complaint rates.
Why? ISPs measure complaints as a percentage of the emails that make it to the inbox. If mail is not hitting the inbox then the complaint rates are zero.
I understand this is a bit of a catch 22, in that to get a good reputation you need to get mail to the inbox and to get mail to the inbox you need a good reputation. But I hear a lot of spammers tell me they absolutely can’t be sending spam because their complaint rates are so low and it’s just not true.

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Just stop spamming!

Al posted a clip from the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar on SpamResource (slightly NSFW) that resonated with me this week.
If you meet me on the street and ask me what my job is I’ll tell you that I work with companies who send bulk email to make sure that they’re not sending spam. I do this by educating clients into good practices and teaching them how to send mail people want to receive. What this statement doesn’t tell people is that usually clients find me because they have been suspended by their ISP for spamming or blocked by some receiver.
Clients who find me because they can’t send mail usually hire me to solve their immediate problem. And I do give the the best advice I can to resolve their problem. But fixing today’s problem isn’t enough, you also need to fix the processes that caused the problem. To me, a critical part of my job is to set clients up for long term success by creating procedures that will get them delisted and keep them from being relisted in the future.
Sometimes, though, I have those moments Al is talking about. When clients don’t actually want to fix their problems, they just want to argue. They want to argue about the definition of spam. They want to argue about permission. They want to argue about how awful their ISPs are for suspending their account. They want to argue about CAN SPAM. They want to argue about free speech. They are angry and they want to fight.
My role is to listen to them, then guide them down a constructive path. I do turn out to be the sounding board for a lot of customers, sometimes they just need to know someone is listening to them. Once they get it all out we can move on into solving the problem.
But, boy, are there the occasional conversations where I just want to scream, “JUST STOP SPAMMING!”

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The dark side of email marketing

Everyone I talk to when dealing with issues inevitably has to tell me they are legitimate email marketers. They’re not spammers, they’re just business people. I often find it difficult to fathom why they need to tell me this. It’s not like email marketers are criminals or anything.
Two recent stories reminded me how evil some folks are. While I’ve not had any direct contact (that I know of) with any of the players on this end of things I have zero doubt that if they called me they would tell me that they were legitimate email marketers.
In one case, a members of a spam gang kidnapped the teenage daughter of someone investigating their activities. The gang held her for more than 5 years in horrific conditions. Yesterday Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error” posted on Boing Boing that his friend got his daughter back. It is a heartbreaking story and incredibly sobering.
In another case, the Russian police arrested a man who ran spammit.com, a clearinghouse for viagra sellers to find spammers to send their mail. Reports say that mail volumes dropped by a fifth after the site was taken offline.
There is real evil in the email marketing industry. Sure, they’re spammers and we can all stand up and say they’re not legitimate. But, this is what the ISPs and Spamhaus and law enforcement are dealing with on a regular basis.

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The rules of delivery success

Senders with delivery problems ask about “the rules.” “Just tell us what the rules are!” “If the ISPs would just tell us what to do we’d do it!” There is only one rule anyone needs to pay attention to for good mail delivery: Respect the recipient.
Not good enough for you? Want more specific rules? OK.
The two rules everyone must follow for good mail delivery.

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