Dear Email Address Occupant

There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap.
Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person didn’t actually know their email address. There are a lot of ways spamtraps can end up on lists that don’t involve malice on the part of the sender.
But I can’t help thinking that mailing an address for 10 years, where the person has never ever responded might be a sign that the address isn’t valid. Or that the recipient might not want what you’re selling or, is not actually a potential customer.
I wrote a few weeks back about the difference between delivery and marketing. That has sparked conversations, including one where I discovered there are a lot of marketers out there that loathe and despise delivery people. But it’s delivery people who understand that not every email address is a potential purchaser. Our job is to make sure that mail to non-existent “customers” doesn’t stop mail from actually getting to actual potential customers.
Email doesn’t have an equivalent of “occupant” or “resident.” Email marketers need to pay attention to their data quality and hygiene. In the snail mail world, that isn’t true. My parents still get marketing mail addressed to me, and I’ve not lived in that house for 20+ years. Sure, it’s possible an 18 year old interested in virginia slims might move into that house at some point, and maybe that 20 years of marketing will pay off. It only costs a few cents to keep that address on their list and the potential return is there.
In email, though, sending mail to addresses that don’t have a real recipient there has the potential to hurt delivery to all other recipients on your list. Is one or two bad addresses going to be the difference between blocked and inbox? No, but the more abandoned addresses and non-existent recipients on a list there are on a list, the more likely filters will decide the mail isn’t really important or wanted.
The cost of keeping that address, one that will never, ever convert on a list may mean losing access to the inbox of actual, real, converting customers.
 

What not to do
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At the same time, I was internet friends with an employee of JPL. I’d met him, like I met many of my online acquaintances, through a pet related mailing list.
One Wednesday, The Onion published an article Mir Scientists Study Effects of Weightlessness on Mortal Terror. As this was the time when the Internet consisted of people banging rocks together, there was not an online link to Onion articles. But I was sure my friend at JPL, and all his friends, would appreciate the joke. That night I stayed late at the lab and typed the article into an email (with full credit to the Onion) and mailed it off to him.
As expected, the article garnered quite a few chuckles and was passed around to various folks inside JPL. What wasn’t expected was another friend, from totally different circles, sending me a copy of that same article 3 days later. Yes, in 1997 it took three days for information to be shared full circle on the Internet.
Information sharing is a whole lot quicker now, with things coming full circle in mere seconds. But that doesn’t make the information any more reliable and true. Take a recent article in ZDNet Research: Spammers actively harvesting emails from Twitter in real-time.
ZDNet links to a study published by Websense, claiming that email addresses on Twitter were available for harvesting.
That’s all well and good, but all ZDNet and Websense are saying is that email addresses are available for harvesting. I’ve not seen any evidence, yet, that spammers are harvesting and sending to them. This doesn’t, of course, mean they’re not, but it would be nice to see the spam email received at an address only shared on twitter.
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There were two major changes to email accounts in the early 2000’s that led to the rise of zombie emails.
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