The Blighty Flag

Back in the dark ages (the late ’90s) most people used dialup to connect to the internet. Those people who had broadband could run all sorts of services off them, including websites and mail servers and such. We had a cable modem for a while handling mail for blighty.com.
At that time blighty.com had an actual website. This site hosted some of the very first online tools for fighting abuse and tracking spam. At the same time, both of us were fairly active on USENET and in other anti-spam fora. This meant there were more than a few spammers who went out of their way to make our lives difficult. Sometimes by filing false complaints, other times by actually causing problems through the website.
At one point, they managed to get a complaint to our cable provider and we were shut off. Steve contacted their postmaster, someone we knew and who knew us, who realized the complaint was bogus and got us turned back on. Postmaster also said he was flagging our account with “the blighty flag” that meant he had to review the account before it would be turned off in the future.
I keep imagining the blighty flag looking like this in somebody’s database.

That is to say, sometimes folks disable accounts they really shouldn’t be disabling. Say, for instance:

This was an accident by a twitter employee, according to a post by @TwitterGov


Twitter needs a blighty flag.

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Who pays for spam?

A couple weeks ago, I published a blog post about monetizing the complaint stream. The premise was that ESPs could offer lower base rates for sending if the customer agreed to pay per complaint. The idea came to me while talking with a deliverability expert at a major ESP. One of their potential customer wanted the ESP to allow them to mail purchased lists. The customer even offered to indemnify the ESP and assume all legal risk for mailing purchased lists.
While on the surface this may seem like a generous offer, there aren’t many legal liabilities associated with sending email. Follow a few basic rules that most of us learn in Kindergarten (say your name, stop poking when asked, don’t lie) and there’s no chance you’ll be legally liable for your actions.
Legal liability is not really the concern for most ESPs. The bigger issues for ESPs including overall sending reputation and cost associated with resolving a block. The idea behind monetizing the complaint stream was making the customer bear some of the risk for bad sends. ESP customers do a lot of bad things, up to and including spamming, without having any financial consequences for the behavior. By sharing  in the non-legal consequences of spamming, the customer may feel some of the effect of their bad decisions.
Right now, ESPs really protect customers from consequences. The ESP pays for the compliance team. The ESP handles negotiations with ISPs and filtering companies. The cost of this is partially built into the sending pricing, but if there is a big problem, the ESP ends up shouldering the bulk of the resolution costs. In some cases, the ESP even loses revenue as they disconnect the sender.
ESPs hide the cost of bad decisions from customers and do not incentivize customers to make good decisions. Maybe if they started making customers shoulder some of the financial liability for spamming there’d be less spamming.

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June 2016: The Month in Email

We’re officially halfway through 2016, and looking forward to a slightly less hectic month around here. I hope you’re enjoying your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere).
 

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The truth matters.

bullhornCall within the next 10 minutes…
Consumers with last names starting with O – Z can call tomorrow…
Only 5 seats left at this price!
 
All of these are common marketing techniques designed to prompt consumers to buy. It’s not a new idea, create a sense of urgency and people are more likely to buy.
I think some marketers are so used to making outrageous claims to support their marketing goals, that it doesn’t occur to them that the truth matters to some people.
There’s almost no better way to get me to send in a spam complaint than to send me an email with a claim about how I opted in.
Example:

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