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...
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...
Unsubscribing from spam, part 2
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...
TWSD: Don't honor opt-outs
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...
New unsubscribe methods in the news
The folks at The Daily Show, who brought us the wonderful term “High Volume Email Deployer” so very long ago, are once again leading the way in new unsubscribe technology. Unsubscribe by television. Meanwhile, the folks at The Daily Mash have a different unsubscribe suggestion. MEMBERSHIP of networking website LinkedIn can only be terminated by destroying its corporate headquarters...
Handling replies to bulk mail
This week’s Wednesday question comes from Ryan W. I’ve been noticing a few e-mail accounts who reply to our e-mail sends with spammy type replies such as, “hey this is intense…..(link)” what do you think should we be removing those e-mails from our mailing? There is no real clear answer to this question, but it’s certainly one that deserves some discussion...