It’s really, really frustrating when an unsubscribe request doesn’t take. And it happens a lot more than many people expect. Most of the culprits are marketing companies. United Business Media is a huge problem, for instance. I never even signed up for their mail, but they bought an address I’d used to register for a conference. I unsubscribed at least a dozen times, but the...
One of the things that is most frustrating to me about sending in spam reports is that many ESPs and senders don’t actively monitor their abuse address. A few months ago I talked about getting spam from Dell to multiple email addresses of mine. What I didn’t talk about was how badly broken the ESP was in handling my complaint. The ESP was, like many ESPs, an organization that grew...
I don’t usually send in spam reports, but I submitted a couple in the last few weeks. Somehow an address of mine is on a bunch of rave / club lists in London. You want to know what is happening at London clubs this week? It’s all there in my spam folder. This mail finally hit my annoyance threshold, so I’ve been submitting reports and complaints to the senders the last few weeks...
Many, many people hire me to educate them on delivery and fix their email problems. This is good, it’s what I do. And I’m quite good at helping clients see where their email program isn’t meeting expectations. I can translate tech speak into marketing. I can explain things in a way that shifts a client’s perception of what the underlying issues are. I can help them find...
Mickey Chandler has a great post up about Triage vs. Planning. Where he talks about the decisions you make differ depending on the context. It’s a good read, and I strongly encourage everyone to go give it a look. But his post led me to a post by Andrew Kordek at Trendline where he claims that there is an industry rule of thumb that says 6 months is the rule of thumb to define an inactive...
Steve wrote a while back about how Mailchimp handled his complaint. Sadly, I have a counter example from recently. Hey, guys, You’ve got a customer hitting an address they bought from someone selling really old lists. This entire domain was retired more than 5 years ago, and laura-info@ was never used to sign up for anything. I sent it to abuse@ the ESP because I thought it might do some...
Sometimes marketers are just sloppy. Take, for example, an email I received today from a company. I wasn’t expecting it (sloppy #1). I never consciously signed up for it (sloppy #2). Apparently I’d bought a package they sold through Appsumo and they claim I asked for future offers. If I did, I didn’t mean to. The email itself used a template from the sender’s ESP, but...
There’s a lot of variation in how ESPs respond to a report of one of their customers sending spam. Almost all ESPs will suppress future email to the recipient. Most will also note that there was a complaint about the sender, and use a count of those complaints for reporting, triage and escalation of problems. Beyond that, though, there’s little consistency. I sent a spam report to...
There was a discussion today on the OI list about email filtering that brought up something I usually don’t mention in delivery discussions. Most email marketers treat the inbox as the holy grail of delivery. Everything about delivery is focused on getting to the magical inbox. I think, though, that inbox is often just shorthand for “not landing in the bulk or spam folders.” For...
There’s been a heavy uptick in botnet spam over the last few days, judging by things I’m hearing and my own mailboxes. There are a few common subject lines, but all of them are trying to get recipients to either run programs or visit malicious web pages. The first subject line I’m seeing a lot of is “<name> wants to be friends with you on facebook!” In my...
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