Marketing or spamming?

A friend of mine sent me a copy of an email she received, asking if I’d ever heard of this particular sender. It seems a B2B lead generation company was sending her an email telling her AOL was blocking their mail and they had stopped delivery. All she needed to do was click a link to reactivate her subscription.
The mail copy and the website spends an awful lot of time talking about how their mail is accidentally blocked by ISPs and businesses.

Many legitimate businesses like emedia are finding that strict spam filters are causing some of our emails to be miss-classified as junk email even though you opted-in to subscribe to our free service.
For information and support to guarantee your ebulletins are delivered click here

I admit it, I have some bias against companies that spend time and energy pointing out how ISPs are being mean and blocking their mail. Yes, ISPs do screw up and occasionally block mail that probably shouldn’t be blocked. But, in my experience, senders who spend a lot of time focused on the blocks are usually not following best practices.
This company is not only sending mail to people who have no idea who they are and don’t remember subscribing, but they’re also violating CAN SPAM. The mail I was forwarded did not contain an opt-out link. I suppose technically it is a transactional message, but if the mail isn’t being delivered what’s the harm in putting in an opt-out link?
emedia also claims to be “an active member of Return Path’s Sender Score Certified program, the leading third party email certification program.” The IP this email came from isn’t certified and has what I consider to be a low Sender Score. Maybe this is an attempt to clean up to stay certified, that’s possible.
One thing that makes me very, very suspicious of this sender is that to sign up for the mail you need to create an account and provide a password. I have this horrible suspicion that were my friend to try and opt-out, they wouldn’t let her do it until she provided a password. This is a clear CAN SPAM violation.
Nonsense like this drives me totally batty. Their webpage looks like hundreds of other marketing webpages out there. They talk a good game. But they’re sending spam and seem to think the problem is “overly strict spam filters” rather than the fact that people they’re mailing never asked to receive their mail.
I interact with a lot of online marketers and I have a huge amount of respect for many of them. I know how difficult it can be to run a good email marketing program and that sometimes it feels like ISPs are a sender’s worst nightmare. Then I look at marketers like this and I understand why ISPs block so much “legitimate” mail. Even if most of the emediaUSA list is opt-in, some portion of it isn’t and I think it’s totally fair game to block all mail from that source.
There are so many esoteric discussions going on where people argue about frequency, list hygiene, data management, and permission. All of those are just ignoring the fact that there are a lot of marketers sending mail the recipients never opted-in to receive. Botnets might be a problem for the ISPs, just in the total volume of mail that hits their mail servers. But for the average person, it’s that non-botnet “legitimate company” spam in their inbox that is the most visible spam problem.

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I got email today to an old work email address of mine from Strongmail. To be fair it was a technically correct email. Everything one would expect from a company handling large volumes of emails.  It’s clear that time and energy was put into the technical setup of the send. If only they had put even half that effort into deciding who to send the email to. Sadly, they didn’t.
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“I can’t be sure from our records but it looks like someone from StrongMail reached out to you several years ago.  It’s helpful that you let us know to unsubscribe you.  Thank you again.”
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How many bad practices can you mix into a single send, Strongmail? Sending mail to addresses where you don’t know how you got them? Sending mail to addresses that you got at least 6 years ago? Sending mail to addresses that were never opted-in to any of your mail? And when people point out, gently and subtly, that maybe this is a bad idea, you just add them to your global suppression list?
Oh. Wait. I know what you’re going to tell me. All of your bad practices don’t count because this was an ‘opt-in’ request. People who didn’t want the mail didn’t have to do anything, therefore there is no reason not to spam them! They ignore it and they are dropped from your list. Except it doesn’t work that way. Double opt-in requests to someone has asked to be subscribed or is an active customer or prospect is one thing. Requests sent to addresses of unknown provenance are still spam.
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