The worst thing about the yahoogle requirements has been their use of the term “one-click unsubscribe”. It’s an overloaded term that’s being used here to mean RFC 8058 in-app unsubscription. That’s a completely different thing to what one-click unsubscription has been used to mean for decades, often in the context of complying with legal requirements around...
When someone sends a complaint to your compliance desk there are a range of things you want to do, but one thing you always want to do is ensure that the recipient doesn’t receive any more unwanted email from your customer. Or, at least, not from your network. There are usually several different ways you can make sure that happens. There are big hammers a compliance desk can use in...
Eventually our subscribers won’t want our email in their inbox any more. They can stop the mail either by unsubscribing from it, or by marking it as spam. We’d far rather they do the first so we should make it as easy as possible for them to unsubscribe. Also in most jurisdictions you’re legally required to offer a functional, easy to use unsubscription channel. So, how to do...
At WWDC 2019 Apple announced “Sign in with Apple.” This is a service that allows iOS users to log into different applications with private, dedicated email address. When developers send mail to that address, Apple will forward it to the email address associated with the users AppleID. App developers that offer any third party log in will be required to also offer AppleID log in. Apple...
One of the side effects of using tagged addresses to sign up for things is seeing exactly what companies do with your data once they get it. For instance, 3 years ago I downloaded a white paper or something from an ESP. That white paper was apparently co-branded and the other company got my email address from the ESP. They’re now sending mail to that address. I unsubscribed from the ESP...
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...
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...
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...
Happy New Year! We’re looking forward to some interesting new projects this year, both for our clients and for Word to the Wise. Stay tuned! December was a slow month for blogging, with everything going on. But we’re back on the horse now and ready to blog for 2017. List and subscription management continue to be hot topics, especially in the wake of the listbombing attacks earlier this...
Dear Laura, We have some questions about best practices for unsubscribes. Our ESP uses the List-Unsubscribe header by default on every email. I’m not familiar with this, and I have some questions for you. First, do you think this is a good idea? Should we always use it, or just for certain emails? Should we use the mailto:link or link to a web site to unsubscribe? We were also asked about double...
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