Irony

The sledgehammer of confirmed opt-in

• laura
• Aug 9, 2011

• Industry

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:

Cheetahmail on appending

• laura
• Jan 19, 2012

• Best Practices

Experian CheetahMail believes that opt-out email appending is no longer an acceptable practice, and that marketers should no longer use of this practice to acquire customer email addresses. EmailResponsibly

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Links Sept 29, 2011

• laura
• Sep 30, 2011

• Asides

Al Iverson has a post up about his experiences with customers who try to acquire email addresses through appending.
J.D. Falk has a post up about the history of DKIM.