Tagunsubscribe

On Father's Day

I’m on quite a few mailing lists for companies whose main product is sending gifts: food hampers, jewelry, flowers, overpriced desk toys and so on. They tend to ramp up their volume before appropriate holidays such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day or Father’s Day and target their promotions to those particular holidays. One recipient may have a...

Recipients need to be able to unsubscribe

The The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced today that Plentyoffish Media paid a $48,000 fine for CASL violations. According to the  CRTC news release, Plentyoffish Media was failing to allow consumers to unsubscribe from mail in compliance with CASL. CASL requires that any commercial electronic email message contain an easy and free unsubscribe mechanism...

My holiday email prediction

I was on IRC with a group of ESP delivery specialists last week and one of them was looking for something to blog about. I suggested a list of holiday predictions. Not that I have a huge number of holiday predictions, but I did come up with one. During the holiday season at least one retailer will decide that they have information so important that they will ignore my opt-0ut request and add me...

August 2014: The Month in Email

Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall. As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there:...

Unsubscribing is hard

A comment came through on my post about unsubscribing that helpfully told me that the problem was I didn’t unsubscribe correctly. As you know, there are usually two unsubscribe options in many of the bulk senders emails. Are you unsubscribing from the global or the offer unsub? Unless you are unsubscribing from both, you will still be on the lists. To address the underlying question, I did...

Yes, spam is actually still a problem

I hear a lot of people claim that spam isn’t really a problem any more. That filters are so good that the average user doesn’t see a lot of spam and if they do get “legitimate” mail that they can just opt out. These are great sounding arguments, the problem is that those arguments aren’t always true. There is an address I stopped using for commercial mail around 1997...

Some email related news

A couple links to relevant things that are happening in email. M3AAWG released the Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link) doc this week. This is the result of 4 years worth of work by a whole lot of people at M3AAWG. I was a part of the working group (“doc champion” in M3AAWG parlance) and want to thank everyone who was involved and contributed to the process. I am very excited...

Spot the unsub

A new game! Spot the unsub! Our first challenge is the footer from a major software company. How long does it take for you to to find the unsub link?   What’s even more annoying is that I never actually subscribed to mail from this company. A few years ago I was doing some work for them and they required I set up an account on their cloud service so they could share docs with me. Last...

Best practices: A Gmail Perspective

At M3AAWG 30 in San Francisco, Gmail representatives presented a session about best practices and what they wanted to see from senders. I came out of the session with a few takeaways. Gmail spends a lot of time and energy on filtering mail and giving the user the absolute best inbox experience possible. Gmail does per-user filtering, probably more than any other ISP out there. Gmail filters are...

Where did you get my address?

Both Steve and I are trying to get answers from Amazon, Target and Epsilon about how Target acquired our Amazon specific email addresses. Target phone reps told us the mail we got was a phish, Epsilon is refusing to acknowledge Target is a customer and Amazon has promised us “they’re looking into it.” Meanwhile, an address of mine was transferred from one customer of an ESP to...

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