TagConfirmed (double) opt-in

January 31, 2014

Update on Herman Cain advertising male enhancement drugs

By laura

3 Min read

6 comments

31January

Shawn Studer from newsmax.com contacted me today with a statement about the Herman Cain mailing list. Newsmax Media represents Herman Cain’s email list. This list was not created from his presidential campaign, but from other activities online where respondents doubled opted-in to receive information from Mr. Cain on his views and activities. At no time are email addresses from the Cain...

July 23, 2013

Spamhaus answers marketer questions

By laura

2 Min read

1 comment

23July

A few months ago, Ken Magill asked marketers, including the folks at Only Influencers to provide him with questions to pass along to Spamhaus. Spamhaus answered the first set in March, but then were hit with the Stophaus attack and put answering further questions on hold. Last week, they provided a second set of answers and this week they provided a third. Nothing in there is surprising, but...

April 16, 2013

Confirmation is too hard…

By laura

2 Min read

3 comments

16April

One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part. I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm. A couple...

April 11, 2013

Don't leave that money sitting there

By laura

3 Min read

2 comments

11April

The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts. I’m...

December 10, 2012

Confirming addresses for transactional mail

By laura

4 Min read

4 comments

10December

A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts. First, let’s look at what Spamhaus has to say. Initially they listed the...

December 4, 2012

Confirmation Fails

By laura

6 Min read

1 comment

04December

Yesterday I talked about registration confirmations. Today I’m going to talk about a couple recent experiences with websites and their registration failures. The first experience was with Yelp. One of my readers decided I needed a Yelp account and created one using my laura-questions email address. Yelp understands that people will be jerks and so sent me an email to confirm the account. Hi...

December 3, 2012

Confirming website registrations

By laura

1 Min read

Add comment

03December

Confirming email addresses during a website registration process is a good practice. It stops people from creating fake accounts, abusing  resources and using that site as a mechanism for harassment. But simply sending out a confirmation mail is not sufficient to prevent problems, particularly when everything about the process assumes that unconfirmed registrations are actually valid and not...

August 11, 2011

Evil weasels and random monkeys

By steve

6 Min read

4 comments

11August

I’m doing testing on a new release of Abacus at the moment, so I’m in a software QA (Quality Assurance) frame of mind. One of the tenets of software QA is “Assume users are malicious”. That’s also one of the tenets of security engineering, but in a completely different way. A security engineer treats users as malicious, as the users he or she is most concerned about...

August 9, 2011

The sledgehammer of confirmed opt-in

By laura

3 Min read

10 comments

09August

We focused Monday on Trend/MAPS blocking fully confirmed opt-in (COI) mail, because that is the Gold Standard for opt-in. It is also Trend/MAPS stated policy that all mail should be COI. There are some problems with this approach. The biggest is that Trend/MAPS is confirming some of the email they receive and then listing COI senders. The other problem is that typos happen by real people signing...

January 10, 2011

Some thoughts on permission

By laura

2 Min read

4 comments

10January

A lot of email marketing best practices center around getting permission to send email to recipients. A lot of anti-spammers argue that the issue is consent not content. Both groups seem to agree that permission is important, but more often than not they disagree about what constitutes permission. For some the only acceptable permission is round trip confirmation, also known as confirmed opt-in...