I’ve mentioned here before that I use tagged addresses whenever I sign up for. This does help me mentally sort out what’s real spam and what’s just mail I’ve forgotten I’ve signed up for. Yesterday, I received and email from e-fense.com thanking me for my interest in their new product. The mail came to a tagged address, but not a tag that I would have given to e...
I’ve talked frequently about permission on this blog, and mentioned over and over again that senders should correctly set expectations at the time they collect permission. Permission isn’t permission if the recipient doesn’t know what they’re agreeing to receive. This is graphically demonstrated in a recent lawsuit filed against Toyota for a marketing program. Toyota sent...
My ISP information page occasionally gets trackback pings from various blog posts. This week one of the trackbacks was from a blog post titled “One man’s Spam is another man’s lunch.” The theme of the blog post was that email marketers are poor, put upon business people that have to contend with all sorts of horrible responses from recipients, spam filtering companies and...
Every sender, big or small, should have the ability to suppress sending to any particular email address. They must, absolutely, be able to stop sending mail to anyone for any reason. Not only is this a legal requirement in every jursidiction that has laws about email marketing, it’s just good business sense. What happens when marketers fail to be able to suppress email addresses? At some...
What do you do when you have a potential customers name and address, but know nothing else about them? You’d really like to be able to send them some targeted marketing, ideally via email. You send them a good old-fashioned letter asking them to volunteer more contact information and answers to a bunch of business classification questions – “What industry are you in?”...
Al has a post listing some of the bad things some sender representatives do when approaching ISPs for delisting. One of the things I would add to the list is hiding behind a privacy protected domain registration. No matter how you dice it, having a business domain behind privacy protection makes a company look illegitimate. For any company sending commercial mail, it’s not even an issue as...
One of the more challenging things I do is work with companies who have poor reputations that they’re trying to repair. These companies have been getting by with poor practices for a while, but finally the daily delivery falls below their pain threshold and they decide they need to fix things. That’s when they call me in, usually asking me if I can go to the ISPs and tell the ISPs...
I’ve written frequently about personal contacts at ISPs and how the vast majority of delivery problems can be solved without picking up the “Bat Phone” and having someone at the ISP do something. Al touches on the same subject today, blogging about his recent experiences having to contact “Barry” multiple times for many different issues. Al resolves My goal going...
“But we only mail people who registered at our website! How can they say we’re spamming?” In those cases where website registration includes notice that the recipient will be added to a list, and / or the recipient receives an email informing them of the type of email they have agreed to receive there is some permission involved. Without any notice, however, there is no...
Over at SpamResource Al talks about how sharing content is like sharing needles. If you’re going to share email templates with somebody else, you’re sharing in their reputation. Lots of good spam filters, like those at Cloudmark, Brightmail, Yahoo and elsewhere, they use what is commonly called “content fingerprinting.” Content fingerprinting is something that a lot of people...
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