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...
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...
Happy October, everyone. As we prepare to head to London for the Email Innovations Summit, we’re taking a look back at our busy September. As always, we welcome your feedback, questions, and amusing anecdotes. Seriously, we could use some amusing anecdotes. Or cat pictures. We continued to discuss the ongoing abuse and the larger issues raised by attacks across the larger internet...
UPDATE 12/17/2015 2:30PM Pacific: I heard from Josh, the CEO of Unroll.me. He says: Senders are seeing a spike in unsubscribe requests because Unroll.Me has been improving the process it uses to unsubscribe our users from emails they have chosen to unsubscribe from. This isn’t a bug and everything is working as it should. This spike they are seeing is temporary and should level out once our...
One of the most important things for any mail sender to do is monitor their mail stream. There are a number of things that every mailer should pay attention to. Some are things to monitor during delivery, some are things to monitor after delivery. All of these things tell senders important information about how their mail is being received by their recipients and the ISPs. What to monitor during...
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...
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...
Yesterday I posted about why the reasons a lot of people give for not unsubscribing from spam are mostly wrong. Unsubscribing from spam doesn’t seem to confirm your address and it doesn’t seem to increase your spam load. But does that mean you should unsubscribe from spam? I’m not sure about that. I’ve been working on a project where I am unsubscribing from every message...
Having been around the email and anti-spam industry for a while, I’ve just about seen and heard it all. In fact, sometimes I’ve been around for the beginning of the myth. One myth that seems to never actually go away is “unsubscribing just confirms you’re a real address and your address will get sold and your spam load will explode.” This is related but orthogonal to...
One of the big arguments various mailers make is that they make it easy for users to opt-out of mail, so it’s not a big deal. Users who don’t want to receive the mail, can make it stop. This was one of the guiding principles of CAN SPAM. The sender can make the decision to send mail to any recipient but they have to offer an opt-out. The problem is there are a lot of major companies...
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