Here at the Atkins house we’re still both recovering from the M3AAWG plague. I don’t know what it was that we shared during the conference, but it’s knocked many folks over. I don’t have a lot to blog about this afternoon so I was looking through some of my old blog posts to get at least some content up before I give up for the weekend. I found an old post about permission...
After some thought, I’ve decided to remove a few ESPs from this list based on personal experience with them allowing customers to send to purchased lists. If your company has disappeared and you want to come back, you’ll need to actually stop the spam coming from your network. Every company that’s been removed has received a complaint from me specifically mentioning the address...
RadioShack is putting their assets up for sale including more than 65 million customer records and 13 million email addresses. Many are up in arms about the sale of personal data including the Texas Attorney General and AT&T who both want the data destroyed. Part of the controversy is that RadioShack’s privacy policy states the collected data will be only used by RadioShack and its...
At the recent Sendgrid Emailmatter’s conference Sally Lehman advised attendees to “Treat someone’s inbox like it was their home.” This is advice I’ve been giving clients for a long time. I think it’s even more relevant now as so many people have data enabled phones and are checking email so frequently. It’s not just their home, it’s their personal...
Michael Geist, a law professor in Canada, writes about the new CASL law, why it’s necessary and why it’s more about privacy and consumer protection than just about spam. The law has at least three goals: provide Canada with tough anti-spam rules, require software companies to better inform consumers about their programs before installation, and update Canadian privacy standards by re...
Another person has written another blog post talking about their experiences with an email address a lot of people add to mailing lists without actually owning the email address. In this case the address isn’t a person’s name, but is rather just what happens when you type across rows on they keyboard. These are similar suggestions to those I (and others) have made in the past. It all...
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...
One of the ongoing discussions in the email space is the one about address verification. Multiple companies have sprung up to do “real time” email address verification. They ensure that addresses collected at the point of sale are valid. But what does valid mean? In most of these contexts, valid means that the addresses don’t bounce and aren’t spam traps. And that is one...
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...
Al has a short, but informative, post up on Spam Resource about privacy groups filing complaints with the FTC about companies violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Companies who are alleged to have violated COPPA include Nickelodeon, McDonalds and General Mills. The underlying issue appears to be the presence of “send to a friend” links maintained on...
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