That's not how you do it…

Got an email this morning from a company advertising their newest webinar “The Two Pillars of Effective Large-Scale Email: Security and Deliverability.” The message came to a tagged address, so clearly I’d given them one at some point. But I didn’t recognize the name or company or anything. I did a search to seen when I may have interacted with this company in the past.

Looking through my old emails, it appears I contacted this company through their support form back in 2007. They were blocking a client’s newsletter. This is what I sent:

One of my clients has asked me to talk with you about your blocking schemes. They’re rather confused as their mail to a customer (one-to-one mail, not bulk) is ending up in the junk/spam folder. They’re not sure what they’re doing to get filtered.
Is there someone who can talk to me about your filtering schemes so I can explain to your mutual customer what is happening?

The response was pretty unhelpful.

I see that the email address insight@ESP is already in Michael’s allow list in his Email Defense filter settings — was this a recent addition? This should let any emails sent from that address through without being filtered first. Another suggestion would be to add the source IP address itself to his allow list if emails are still being caught. Let us know if this alleviates the situation.

That’s the last I heard from said company until this morning, when they sent me an ad.

A common question we’re asked is “How can I safely and securely utilize large-scale/mass emailing to communicate?”
Whether you’re sending newsletters, announcements, notifications, even sensitive or private information, there are two pillars you must have in place to ensure your communications are sent securely AND are delivered without being classified as spam.

One way to prevent communications from being classified as spam is to not grab addresses from a decade ago out of your support queue and use them for marketing out of the blue. Also, I’m much more likely to trust your opinion on delivery if you follow CAN SPAM. I mean, it’s nice you sent me a picture of the nice lady who sent the spam, but you forgot to put a postal address on the email.
Interestingly enough, the company actually has a pretty effective sounding AUP for their customers. They prohibit, among other things:

• Automatically opting visitors or purchasers into their subscriber list. This includes “pre-checking” an opt in box on forms.
• Automatically adding subscribers on one mailing list to unrelated mailing lists
• Sending emails to subscribers that are unrelated to the purpose to which they opted in
• Adding people to the mailing list without their permission
• Sending messages to people who have requested to be removed from the mailing list
• Using old lists without checking with the subscribers that their addresses are still valid and that they still wish to be subscribed.

Too bad they don’t apply their AUP to their own email program.