Evolution of policy

laura
Industry
October 1, 2018

Last week, I talked about policy, using some different blocklist policies as examples. In that post I talked about how important it is that policy evolve. One example of that is how we’ve been evolving policy related to companies that get listed on Purchased Lists and ESPs. Who is listed has evolved over time, and we’re actually looking at some policy changes right now.

Listing policy 1

The first iteration of the list was crowdsourced by deliverability people. One person mentioned they had a list they used when customers would argue “X company lets me send to purchased lists.” That list got shared and lots of folks contributed their company names. I offered to publish the list and thus the initial blog post.

Your company was added to the list by being nominated from a small group of people.

Listing policy 2

Once the blog post went up a surprising number of companies asked to be added to the list. I was happy to add the companies but needed some criteria other than nominated by this group of people. Our policy had to evolve to cover self-nominations. Whatever the policy was it needed to be something I could easily check and verify and couldn’t take up a significant amount of time.

Your company was added to the list by being nominated from a small group of people; or
Your company was self nominated and your terms and conditions / acceptable use policy states you do not allow purchased lists.

At the time I created policy 2 there were some specific goals driving it. We were getting regular requests to be added to the list. I didn’t have a lot of time or energy to vet every listing. There was also some pushback from anti-spam groups on the initial post that the list wasn’t accurate. Thus, the requirement that there be a public statement on the company’s website stating public lists weren’t allowed.

Listing policy 3

There’s one company on the list we’ve been having ongoing, frustrating interactions with. They don’t seem to enforce their abuse policy at all. We’ve reported multiple customers who are spamming purchased (and “purchased“) lists and the company refuses to take any action. The same customers keep spamming us over and over again. They meet the criteria for listing – they have a public policy that says they don’t allow purchased lists. But we’re seeing ongoing mail to addresses that are either purchased or stolen.

We decided to remove strike that company from the list. That’s fine, we’re allowed to make exceptions to the policy. I also always knew that “having a public statement against purchased lists” was a bit of a weak policy. Many companies have those public statements but don’t actually stop customers from sending to purchased lists. I was sure I’d have to wrestle with this issue sooner or later.

What are the goals?

The initial goal was to post timely information based on conversations happening in the industry. There were folks who wanted the lists to be more public, so they could point their own customers at it. We met that goal.

The second goal was to allow companies to add themselves to the list with some confidence they belonged on the list.

My newest goal is to sensibly and fairly add (and remove) companies who are not enforcing their policy. But what does not enforcing their policy look like? In the case of the company we removed from the list, we have sufficient evidence that they’re not stopping spam off their network. I’m pretty convinced there are other companies on the list that poorly manage their customers, too. But we don’t have as much direct evidence against those other companies.

The questions I’m asking as I think about what a sane policy would look like include:

what is the goal of the list now? is it to give props to companies that enforce their policies? is it simply to give companies a place to point to regarding ESPs that prohibit purchased lists?
if the goal is to highlight companies that are actually enforcing their policies, what does ‘enforcing their policies’ look like?
do I want to do all the vetting myself or should other people be involved in vetting?
how accurate do I want the list to be?
does it matter if companies get onto the list when they don’t qualify?
what is my time availability and how does that interact with the policy requirements?
does any of this matter?

I don’t have answers to all of the questions. I would prefer that the list be accurate and reflect only those companies that actively prevent their customers from sending to purchased lists. But how to ensure accuracy? And what counts? Does blocking mail to people who complain count? Making customers reconfirm lists?

This is one of the challenging bits of policy development. I don’t have answers, yet. At best the current policy is

Your company was added to the list by being nominated from a small group of people; or
Your company was self nominated and your terms and conditions / acceptable use policy states you do not allow purchased lists.
I don’t have any direct or overwhelming evidence customers are allowed to send spam to purchased lists.

For today, that’s good enough. But I know that it’s a stop gap policy, not a long term one.

Social media connections are not opt-ins

It seems silly to have to say this, but connecting on social media is not permission to add an address to your newsletter or mailing list or prospecting list or spam list. Back in 2016, I wrote:

May 2015: The Month in Email

Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures.
In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of the ESPs that have a clearly stated policy that they will not tolerate purchased lists. This should be valuable ammunition both for ESPs and for email program managers when they asked to use purchased lists. Let us know if we’re missing any ESPs by commenting directly on that post. We also shared an example of what we saw when we worked with a client using a list that had been collected by a third party.
In other best practices around addresses, we discussed all the problems that arise when people use what they think are fake addresses to fill out web forms, and gave a nod to a marketer trying an alternate contact method to let customers know their email is bouncing.
We also shared some of the things we advise our clients to do when they are setting up a mailing or optimizing an existing program. You might consider trying them before your own next send. In the “what not to do” category, we highlighted four things that spammers do that set them apart from legitimate senders.
In industry news, we talked about mergers, acquisitions and the resulting business changes: Verizon is buying AOL, Aurea is buying Lyris, Microsoft will converge Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail, and Sprint will no longer support clear.net and clearwire.net addresses.
Josh posted about Yahoo’s updated deliverability FAQ, which is interesting reading if you’re keeping up on deliverability and ESP best practices. He also wrote about a new development in the land of DMARC: BestGuessPass. Josh also wrote a really useful post about the differences between the Mail From and the Display From addresses, which is a handy reference if you ever need to explain it to someone.
And finally, I contributed a few “meta” posts this month that you might enjoy:

Buying lists costs more than just money

I’ve been talking to a lot of companies recently who are dealing with some major delivery challenges probably related to their practice of purchasing lists and then sending advertising to every address on the list. They assure me that their businesses would be non-viable if they didn’t purchase lists and it has to be that way.
Maybe that’s true, maybe it is more cost effective to purchase lists and send mail to them. I know, though, that their delivery is pretty bad. And that a lot of the addresses they buy never see their email. And that they risk losing their ESP, or they risk being SBLed, or they risk being blocked at Gmail, or they risk bulk foldering at Hotmail. There are a lot of risks to using purchased lists.
The reality is it’s only getting harder to mail to purchased lists and it’s getting more expensive to mail purchased lists. Paying for the list is a small part of the cost of using them.
Other costs incurred by companies using purchased lists include:
1) Having multiple ESPs. There are certainly legitimate reasons for companies to use different ESPs but there is a cost associated with it. Not only do they have to pay for duplicate services, but they spend a lot of employee time moving lists and recipients around to see who might have the better delivery today.
2) Multiple domains and brand new websites for every send. Landing pages are good marketing and are normal. But some ISPs track the IPs of the landing sites, and those IPs can get their own poor reputation. To get around it, senders using purchased lists often have to create new websites on new IPs for every send.
3) Complicated sending schedules. Sending schedules aren’t dictated by internal needs, they’re dictated by what ISP is blocking their IPs or domains (or even ESP) right now.
All of these costs are hidden, though. The only cost on the actual bottom line is the money they spend for the addresses themselves and that’s peanuts. Because, fundamentally, the folks selling addresses have no incentive to take any care in collecting or verifying the data. In fact, any verification they do only cuts into their profit, as buyers won’t actually pay for the verification and data hygiene and it also reduces the size of the lists they can sell.
And, no, data hygiene companies that look for traps and bounces and “bad addresses” don’t take a bad list and make it good. They just take a bad list and make it a little less bad. If the recipients don’t want the mail, all the hygiene in the world isn’t going to get that message into the inbox.
Outsourcing address collection to list selling companies is more expensive than it looks on paper. That doesn’t stop anyone from building a business around purchased lists, though.