I come up against a lot of denial when talking with people about spam and email. It makes sense, nobody likes spam. Nobody wants to send spam. And I do understand the initial denial when they hear “you’re mail looks like spam” or “you spammed me.” It often takes overwhelming evidence to convince some senders that their mail is spam. I’ve talked before about...
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...
Today (well, actually tomorrow, but only because New Zealand is on the other side of the date line) the NZ Department of Internal Affairs added a 3rd statement of claim against Brendan Battles and IMG Marketing. This third claim brings the total possible fines to $2.1 million. Brendan is a long term spammer, who used to be in the US and moved to New Zealand in 2006. His presence in Auckland was...
By creating web domains that contained commonly mistyped names, the investigators received emails that would otherwise not be delivered. Over six months they grabbed 20GB of data made up of 120,000 wrongly sent messages. BBC News The focus of the article is on how companies are opening themselves up to security holes. While most marketing email doesn’t come with security risks, some of it...
Steve wrote a while back about how Mailchimp handled his complaint. Sadly, I have a counter example from recently. Hey, guys, You’ve got a customer hitting an address they bought from someone selling really old lists. This entire domain was retired more than 5 years ago, and laura-info@ was never used to sign up for anything. I sent it to abuse@ the ESP because I thought it might do some...
It’s Friday, it’s been a long week and while I have things to say I’m looking for some entertainment. What are your favorite spam subject lines? Here are some of mine: “Having rock-like winky is easy”(OK, I admit, sometimes I’m 12 and “winky” makes me laugh) “-Enlarge-your ~Penis up to 3 per month!” (Up to three what per month? And every...
According to data published by Litmus this week.
Sometimes marketers are just sloppy. Take, for example, an email I received today from a company. I wasn’t expecting it (sloppy #1). I never consciously signed up for it (sloppy #2). Apparently I’d bought a package they sold through Appsumo and they claim I asked for future offers. If I did, I didn’t mean to. The email itself used a template from the sender’s ESP, but...
I found a blog post from a technical type talking about email engagement. This is a non-marketing way to do things, and probably won’t work for many marketing programs. But I think good marketers should be listening to what their recipients say, even if it’s counter-intuitive.
Edit 9/15: the website seems to have expired so I changed the link to the google cache of the article.
On August 30, 2007 I wrote my very first blog post: 7th Circuit court ruling in e360 v. Spamhaus. Today, 4 years later (almost to the day) that case may finally be over. After a bench trial on the issue, the district court awarded e360 a mere $27,002, a far cry from the millions of dollars that e360 sought. Both parties have appealed. We conclude that the district court properly struck most of...
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