Brad Taylor has a post on the official Gmail blog talking about the new unsubscribe option. There are two points I didn’t cover here yesterday. you’ll only see the unsubscribe option for senders that we’re pretty sure are not spammers and will actually honor your unsubscribe request. We’re being pretty conservative about which senders to trust in the beginning; over time...
This morning Lifehacker reported that Gmail was offering an option to unsubscribe from some legitimate email lists. Gmail’s help pages say: We don’t think you should be burdened with managing messages you don’t want to receive. We do our best to put messages in Spam when we’re pretty sure you won’t want or need them. But everyone has different preferences about the...
Why do recipients complain about my email? This question is asked over and over again and there is no one answer. There are a number of reasons and all of them interact with one another. What factors have recipients mentioned? High frequency – mail that is too frequent can annoy recipients and they’ll hit this is spam Low frequency – mail that is too infrequent may be unfamiliar...
Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the email marketers’ syllogism. Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out. Most people don’t opt-out. Therefore, most people want our mail. This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers...
A fellow delivery specialist sent me a question this morning. What is your opinion on putting CAN SPAM compliance information (postal address, unsubscribe link, etc) in an image? The short answer is this is something spammers do and something that legitimate mailers should never want to do. The longer answer needs to look at why spammers do this, why legitimate marketers may think about doing...
Eric Goldman has an interesting blog post over at hit Technology and Marketing Law blog comparing and contrasting twitter and email. One of the reasons he likes Twitter is that it gives him, the ‘subscriber’ (follower in Twitspeak) control. There’s no chance that the company will sell his data. And, if the company does tweet too much that is uninteresting or irrelevant, the...
This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam. Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged...
Whatever one might think about confirming opt-ins I think we can all agree that requiring someone to jump through hoops and confirm an unsubscription request will just annoy that person. Today I attempt to opt-out from a discussion list. It’s one I *thought* I had opted out of previously, but I could find no record of the request anywhere. OK. So I imagined unsubscribing, I’ll just...
I tend to avoid online sites that require you to register and provide information including email addresses. In my experiences companies cannot resist sending email and my email load is extremely heavy and I want less email, not more. Sometimes, though, what I need to do requires an online registration and giving an email address to a company I would really prefer not to have it. Recently, I had...
In early July, the Magilla Marketing newsletter has an article about how email preference centers may now be illegal due to the clarifications published by the FTC. Trevor Hughes of the ESPC is quoted extensively, lamenting about how marketers cannot legally interfere in the unsubscribe process. The FTC’s opt out clarification “complicates things in that it demands simplicity when simplicity may...
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