The sledgehammer of confirmed opt-in

We focused Monday on Trend/MAPS blocking fully confirmed opt-in (COI) mail, because that is the Gold Standard for opt-in. It is also Trend/MAPS stated policy that all mail should be COI. There are some problems with this approach. The biggest is that Trend/MAPS is confirming some of the email they receive and then listing COI senders.
The other problem is that typos happen by real people signing up for mail they want. Because MAPS is using typo domains to drive listings, they’re going to see a lot of mail from companies that are doing single opt-in. I realize that there are problems with single opt-in mail, but the problems depends on a lot of factors. Not all single opt-in lists are full of traps and spam and bad data.
In fact, one ESP has a customer with a list of more than 50 million single opt-in email addresses. This sender mails extremely heavily, and yet sees little to no blocking by public or private blocklists.
Trend/MAPS policy is singling out senders that are sending mail people signed up to receive. We know for sure that hard core spammers spend a lot of time and money to identify spamtraps. The typo traps that Trend/MAPS use are pretty easy to find and I have no doubt that the real, problematic spammers are pulling traps out of their lists. Legitimate senders, particularly the ESPs, aren’t going to do that. As one ESP rep commented on yesterday’s post:

I work for an ESP and we don’t suppress domains like this, based on the theory that if a client is hitting spamtraps, we want to know so we can sanction or terminate them. But if Trend are acting in bad faith here, I guess my best bet is just to suppress any domain of theirs I can find (and it took about 30 seconds to find 2700 of them).   Another Anon

That’s a sentiment I heard over and over again from companies listed by Trend/MAPS. The companies are happy to force their customers to clean up their acts.  They want reports of bad behaviour by customers, but Trend/MAPS policy of forcing confirmations is taking a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

I think we have a reputation of being a bit harsh on customers, and we’re honestly a little proud of that. But I’m most proud of the fact that we are always fair and honest, even with the bad people.
We tell people what they need to change. The bad people who won’t take our advice are easy to kick out after that.
In this particular situation, we don’t have any advice to give. We don’t have a way to tell people “go do this.” Because it would be a lie. “Go remove inactives” won’t help. “Go re-confirm inactives” won’t help. Even “Go use double opt-in” won’t help if MAPS is clicking and opening everything.
And because MAPS is who they are, we can’t provide a lot of detail to customers, either.  An ESP Executive

COI is a tool. It is occasionally a good tool for keeping lists clean. But I’ve worked with dozens of senders over the year that aren’t using COI and are still keeping their lists clean because they have other processes in place to do so.

Related Posts

How not to build a mailing list

I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

Read More

Changes at Gmail

As I’ve said before, I can usually tell when some ISP changes their filtering algorithm because I start getting tons and tons of calls about delivery problems at that ISP. This past month it’s been Gmail.
There have been two symptoms I’ve been hearing about. One is an increase in bulk folder delivery for mail that previously was reliably hitting the inbox. The other is a bit more interesting. I’ve heard of 3 different mailers, with good reputations and very clean lists, that are seeing 4xx delays on some of their mail. The only consistency I, and my colleagues at some ESPs, have identified is that the mail is “bursty.”
The senders affected by this do send out mail daily, but the daily mail is primarily order confirmations or receipts or other transactional mails. They send bi-weekly newsletters, though, exploding their volume from a few tens of thousands up to hundreds of thousands. This seems to trigger Gmail to defer mail. It does get delivered eventually. It’s frustrating to try and deal with because neither side is really doing anything wrong, but good senders are seeing delivery delays.
For the bulk foldering, Bronto has a good blog post talking about the changes and offering some solid suggestions for how to deal with them. I’m also hearing from some folks who are reliable that Gmail may be rolling back some of the bulk foldering changes based on feedback from their users.
So if you’re seeing changes at Gmail, it’s not just you.

Read More

Change is required

I get a lot of calls from senders who tell me that they have not changed what they were doing, but all of a sudden their mail isn’t performing the way it used to. Sometimes it’s simply less effective marketing, but more often than not the issue is mail being blocked or filtered to the bulk folder.
What worked today won’t work tomorrow. Spammers are forever evolving new techniques to get past spam filters. ISPs are forever evolving new techniques to stop them.
One of the current driving forces for spam filter development is focused on the individual recipients. Recipient wants and needs are king in the world of ISP mail filtering. Much of that is driven by the underlying business models of the free ISPs. They are selling eyeballs to their advertisers and that relies on keeping as many eyeballs around for as long as possible.
An early version of the recipient driven filtering was “add to your address book” where individual users could over ride ISP delivery decisions by actively adding a From: address to their address book. The ISPs have been refining this over time. For instance, if you reply to an email in some clients, you are prompted to add that address to your address books. If you take an email out of your bulk folder and move it to your inbox then that address is automatically added to your address book.
But the refinements haven’t stopped there. ISPs are now making smart decisions about what emails a particular recipient will want to receive. This raises a number of challenges to senders. How do you send email to ten thousand or a hundred thousand or a million people and make it relevant to all of them?
Smart senders will take the individual delivery challenge in stride. They will change along with the ISPs, to send mail that their recipients want to receive. Change is inevitable and required.

Read More