MAAWG statement on email appending

MAAWG has published their position statement on email appending. It’s pretty explicit in it’s condemnation of the practice.

It is the position of MAAWG that email appending is an abusive practice. Sending email to someone who did not explicitly give informed consent for his or her email address to be used in this way is never acceptable. It will result in complaints, which only further illustrates how much end users find this practice abusive. It will result in delivery issues, largely as a result of those complaints. Legitimate marketers do not engage in email appending.

(bold in the original)
MAAWG isn’t mincing words here. They do not support sending mail without permission. They do not believe that matching an email address with a customer record constitutes permission to mail to that customer.

Related Posts

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.

Read More

Back from MAAWG

Today is the first day back at work after a productive MAAWG conference.
The thing I get most out of MAAWG is a greater appreciation for what a large, global force messaging is. The recent protests and uprisings around the world have relied on messaging to organize, share information and communicate. Messaging is also somewhat fragile. Thing things that make it great for strangers to interact with one another also allows bad people and organizations to cause harm.
It is a struggle to minimize the harm while not hurting the good.
MAAWG is comprised of the people that make messaging work. These are folks that are on the front lines in the fight to stop online harm. It’s somewhat humbling to watch a conference full of really smart people, from all levels of responsibility, discuss ways to improve messaging for real users and real people while stopping the bad people. There are good ideas and bad ideas, but discussions are professional and informative. Plus it’s always good to see old friends and make new ones.
I inevitably come back from MAAWG with a load of things to do, new projects to take on and new ideas. This time I’m also looking forward to the publication of a document announced at the conference. The EastWest Institute’s Chief Technology Officer Karl Frederick Rauscher talked about a report they will be publishing next month talking about how China and the US are working together to fight spam.

Read More

Permission-ish based marketing

My Mum flew in to visit last week, and over dinner one evening the talk turned to email.

Read More