Tagopt-out

December 9, 2019

It’s not marketing… it’s harassment

By laura

2 Min read

3 comments

09December

Many years ago, we bought a VMWare license to manage the various virtual machines running our business infrastructure. As part of our move to Dublin, we decommissioned our cabinet and moved all of services into various bits of the cloud. This meant that when our VMWare support contract came up for renewal we declined the renewal. Despite no longer being customers and unsubscribing from email...

October 29, 2018

Transactional mail can be spam

By laura

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29October

Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can bother spam get their brand in front of people who’ve opted out. Enter the...

October 18, 2018

Jane! Stop this crazy thing!

By laura

4 Min read

3 comments

18October

One of the consequences of moving to Ireland is I’m unsubscribing from most commercial mail, including some lists I’ve been on for a decade or more. Sadly, many of the companies don’t ship to Ireland, or their shipping costs are prohibitively expensive. Even if I wanted to purchase from them, I couldn’t. This process has made me realise how horrible many company’s...

May 24, 2018

I subscribed to what?

By laura

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24May

Tomorrow is GDPR day. That’s the day when the new Global Data Protection Regulations take effect in the EU. I’m sure everyone reading this blog has seen dozens, if not hundreds, of blog posts, articles, webinars, and guidance docs about how to comply. I’m not going to rehash it because, other folks know this better than me. There are a some things I’m finding fascinating...

April 17, 2018

Don't bother unsubscribing

By laura

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17April

In the early years of the spam problem, a common piece of advice was to never unsubscribe. At the time, this made a lot of sense. Multiple anti-spammers documented spammers harvesting addresses from unsubscribe forms. This activity tapered off around 2000 or so, although the myth persisted for much longer. These days, there isn’t much harm in unsubscribing. I even spent a full month...

July 21, 2017

I'm not a customer any more

By laura

6 Min read

2 comments

21July

We recently moved co-working spaces, after 8 or 9 years in the same place.  I’ll be up front here, we left Space A because I was annoyed with them. I’ve been increasingly unhappy with them for a while, but moving is a pain so just put up with them. But their most recent rent increase along with the lost packages, increasing deposit requirements and revolving door of incompetent staff...

September 26, 2016

iOS List Unsubscribe Functionality

By laura

3 Min read

1 comment

26September

Al did a great post over on Spamresource about the how the new list unsubscribe function in the default mail client from iOS10. What’s been interesting to me is how much I’m hearing from ESP folks about how their customers want it gone. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, in the default mail client on iOS10, Apple is now offering a way to unsubscribe from list mail...

May 20, 2016

Ask Laura: What about Transactional Opt-Outs?

By laura

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20May

Dear Laura, We are having a bit of an internal struggle on our end as we launch our new quarterly account summaries. What are your views on including an unsubscribe link in these emails? My personal opinion is that we should. Although the summaries can be classified as “transactional”, they are not tied to a specific recent transaction a customer made and can be viewed as a general...

May 6, 2016

Ask Laura: Confused about CAN SPAM

By laura

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06May

Dear Laura,  I read your blog post about CAN SPAM earlier this week, and there’s one thing that confuses me. You never mention that harvesting addresses is a violation. I’ve seen many other people, including lawyers, assert that harvesting addresses is a violation of CAN SPAM. Why did you leave that out? Signed, Hopeful maker of musubi Dear Hopeful, The idea that harvesting is, in and...

May 4, 2015

April 2015: The Month in Email

By laura

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04May

We started the month with some conversations about best practices, both generally looking at the sort of best practices people follow (or don’t) as well as some specific practices we wanted to look at in more depth. Three for this month: Be gracious with opt-out requests. Email marketing is hard. Even when it’s successful, response rates can be very low. It is surely frustrating to hear from...