Yeah… don’t do that

Never add someone to a mailing list without giving them a heads up that you’re doing it. It’s just uncool and rude. For example, I have been contacting some vendors about some work we need done. One of them has yet to answer my inquiry, but has already added me to their newsletter. Even worse, I had no idea submitting a form asking about their services would get me on their mailing list.

In this case, it’s more than rude, as they are a European company and didn’t ask permission to send my personal data to Mailchimp it’s a GDPR violation. In fact, there’s no notice on their

It’s clear they’ve put some thought and effort into their email program. The newsletter arrived in my inbox just a few hours after I submitted my request. The charitable part of me says it’s all automated and it’s not intended to be annoying. But the sole call to action on the bulk email is “contact us to hear more about our services” and… that’s exactly what I did.

I contacted them about their services and they responded with an email encouraging me to contact them about their services. As an email professional I get how and why this happens. As a consumer, I’m deeply annoyed and it’s a frustrating consumer experience.

When you’re going to add someone to a newsletter tell them you’re going to do it. Ideally give them a choice. It’s 2019, this isn’t rocket science. This isn’t some new fangled requirement. Permission is a best practice.

How much has changed and will change
What’s a suspicious domain?

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Some content is just bad; but it doesn't have to be

There are a few segments in the marketing industry that seem to acquire senders with bad mailing practices. Nutraceuticals, male performance enhancing drugs, short term or payday loans and gambling have a lot of senders that treat permission as optional. The content and the industry themselves have garnered a bad reputation.
This makes these industries extremely difficult for mailers who actually have permission to send that content to their recipients. Working with this kind of sender, sometimes it seems impossible to get mail delivered to the inbox, no matter what the level of permission. Even when it’s double confirmed opt-in with a cherry on top, all the care in the world with permission isn’t enough to get inbox delivery.
This doesn’t have to be the case. Look at the porn industry. Early on in the email marketing arena there was a lot of unsolicited image porn. A Lot. So much that complaints by recipients drove many ISPs to disable image loading by default. The legitimate porn companies, though, decided unsolicited image porn was bad for the industry as a whole. Porn marketers and mailers adopted fairly strong permission and email address verification standards.
It was important for the porn marketers that they be able to prove that the person they were mailing actually requested the email. The porn marketers took permission seriously and very few companies actually send photographic porn spam these days. Even the “Russian girls” spam doesn’t have not safe for work images any longer.
Because of their focus on permission, in some cases revolving around age of consent in various jurisdictions, the porn industry as a whole is not looked at as “a bunch of spammers.” Porn content isn’t treated as harshly as “your[sic] pre-approved for a wire transfer” or “best quality drugs shipped overnight.”
Just having offensive content isn’t going to get you blocked. But having content that is shared by many other companies who don’t care about permission, will cause delivery headache after delivery headache. This is true even when you are the One Clean Sender in the bunch.
 

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Delete or read?

This week I attended a Data Visualization workshop presented by the Advanced Media Center at UC Berkeley. Every year I set at least one professional development goal; this year it’s learning how to better communicate visually.

Part of the class included other resources, which led me to Nathan Yau’s website. One of the articles on the front page of his site is titled “Email Deletion Flow Chart.” Well, of course I had to read the post.

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Dr. Livingston, I presume?

I linked to Al’s post about misdirected emails and how annoying it is for people who receive emails. I’ve previously talked about the problems associated with not handling misdirected emails properly.
It’s really annoying getting email that you never signed up for. For instance, one of my email addresses gets quite a bit of misdirected email. Oddly enough, much of this mail comes addressed to “Mrs. Christine Stelfox” and advertises various services. The problem is, I’m not Mrs. Christine Stelfox and I don’t live in the UK.
I’ve been getting this misdirected email for a while. In fact, I’ve even tried to track down the source of this just to make it stop. But I can’t seem to get that to happen. The senders tell me simply that I opted in, and that if I want to opt-out, here’s a link. Sometimes I have more luck contacting ESPs, but not always.
In fact, recently I reported spam to Mrs. Stelfox to a European based ESP. I got a response from their delivery head, who asked a lot of questions about the email address. What kind of spamtrap was it? How long had I had it? Is it possible it’s a recycled address? It’s really not, though. It’s an address I’ve had since early 1994, and it’s not really a trap as I still actually use if for some me. But I’ve not used it for commercial email since sometime in the late ’90s. And I’ve certainly never claimed to be a Mrs. Stelfox.
This really isn’t a case where I forgot I signed up. This isn’t a case where someone had the address before me. This is either some confused person using my address or some company in the UK selling my email address as belonging to someone else. I’ve tried to track this down in the past to get off the list of whomever is selling this address. But I’ve never had any luck.
There isn’t a lot of recourse here. I can continue to unsubscribe the addresses, but that doesn’t resolve the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that many marketers think it’s acceptable to purchase (or append) email addresses with no regard for the fact that sometimes their data suppliers are wrong.
It’s not just this one address, either. Another one of my email addresses is being sold as “Mrs. Laura Corbishley” of the UK as well. Sometimes I get the same spam to Mrs. Christine Stelfox and Mrs. Laura Corbishley. Other times I get different spams to each address, possibly because Mrs. Stelfox is behind some commercial email filters and Mrs. Corbishley isn’t.
Misdirected emails are annoying. They’re a problem for the people who keep getting them and can’t make them stop. It’s really important that ESPs, companies that send email and companies that sell email addresses have some way to make that mail stop. It doesn’t matter that half a dozen ESPs have put Mrs. Stelfox in their suppression list. Senders are still purchasing that data and are wasting their money. I am still getting spam.
 
 
 

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