I’ve been sitting on this one for about a week, after the folks over at IBM/Pivotal Veracity called me to tell me about this. But now their post is out, so I can share.
There are ISPs providing real metrics to senders: QQ and Mail.ru. Check out Laura Villevieille’s blog post for the full details.
There’s a concert promoter in London that’s been spamming me for years and years. Most of the time my spam filters take care of it and I never see their mail. Every once in a while, though, one of emails gets through and ends up in my inbox. Usually I move it to junk, curse at my filters for not getting it right and just go on with whatever I’m doing.
I suspect this is more common than not with most people. Those lucky enough to have a “this is spam” button can make the mail stop by clicking it. Others, like me, just have to delete it and move on.
Sometimes, though, I get to the point where I’ve had enough. I’ll send in a complaint to the sender or their provider.
I have to wonder, though, how many people react to email negatively and hit “this is spam” when they’ve been ignoring mail for a while. This can complicate the lives of senders (what doesn’t?) because the “this is spam” isn’t in reaction to a specific email, but happens due to circumstances outside of the sender’s control.
Delivery is an ever changing field, and it’s just getting more complex and harder as receiver tools get more sophisticated.
There are a lot of people who abuse online services and use online services to abuse and harass other people. But handling complaints and handling the abuse are often afterthoughts for many new companies. They don’t think about how to accept and process complaints until they show up. Nor do they think about how bad people can abuse a system before hand.
But dealing with complaints is important and can be complicated. I’ve written many a complaint handling process document over the years, but even I was impressed with the Facebook flowchart that’s been passed around recently.
In the email space, though, all too many companies just shrug off complaints. They don’t really pay attention to what recipients are saying and treat complaints merely as unsubscribe requests. Their whole goal is to keep complaints below the threshold that gets them blocked at ISPs. To be fair, this isn’t as true with ESPs as it is with direct senders, many ESPs pay a lot of attention to complaints and will, in fact, initiate an investigation into a customer’s practice on a report from a trusted complainant.
There are a lot of legitimate email senders out there who value quantity over quality when it comes to complaints. But that doesn’t mean their lists are good or clean or they won’t see delivery problems or SBL listings at some point.
A friend of the blog contacted me earlier today and pointed out that the news that Dan posted about Yahoo and engagement that I blogged about last week was actually reported by George Bilbrey in a Mediapost article on August 1.
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