A blast from the past

I’m sitting here watching Iron Chef (the real one, not the American version) and surfing around on SFGate.com. It’s a slow night catching up on all the news I’ve missed this week while off traveling. I see a link on the front page: “Web marketer ordered to pay Facebook $711M.” As I click I wonder if I know the web marketer in question. A former client? A name I recognize?

Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.”

Sanford. Wallace.
The man who so abused junk faxes in the early 1990s that Congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.
The man who was one of the early, notorious players in the spam industry.
A man who was one of the first spammers sued by a large ISP, and lost.
The man who sued AOL in 1997 and lost, creating some of the first case law that allows ISPs to block mail that their users don’t want.
A man who has reveled in his status as a rogue, pushing limits and making money for himself.
A man who has gone from dubious enterprise to dubious enterprise, changing fields when the legal bills and judgments got too high.
Sanford. Wallace.
I still remember some of the first spam I got from savetress.com, one of Cyberpromo’s primary domains. The first few messages were annoying, but when I started getting tens of spam a day (yes, tens, it was a different world on the ‘net then) I decided to start learning about email, how it worked and how to protect my accounts from spam. It was his lawsuit against AGIS that prompted my first foray into the net-abuse newsgroups. Talking with Sanford about his new, legitimate marketing business was my first experience in negotiating with spammers. While I hate to actually say “Sanford Wallace changed my life,” it’s not that far from the truth. Frustration over his spam led me to a career of being an email expert. Interaction with people as frustrated as I was not only introduced me to a new circle of friends, it also resulted in me meeting the man who is now my husband.
I just spent 3 days with a bunch of people who make email work; talking and troubleshooting with them to figure out just how to keep email working and useful in the face of massive and sophisticated spam attacks few of us imagined 10+ years ago. I don’t often think about what it was like when I was first on the internet, when you could actually open an unfiltered mailbox and have only mail from friends (or no mail at all!). How ironic that while winding down from that conference I find that Sanford is, once again, losing a lawsuit for abusing the internet.

Problems at Cox: Resolved
Canadian Law

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Suppressing email addresses: it's good for everyone

Every sender, big or small, should have the ability to suppress sending to any particular email address. They must, absolutely, be able to stop sending mail to anyone for any reason. Not only is this a legal requirement in every jursidiction that has laws about email marketing, it’s just good business sense.
What happens when marketers fail to be able to suppress email addresses? At some point they’re going to mail someone who gets annoyed enough with them to make it public that they are too incompetent to run an email program.
This happened to the folks over at spamfighter.com recently. They have been spamming Neil Schwartzman (spamfighter, Executive director of CAUCE North America, Director of Standards and Certification at ReturnPath) since somewhere in 2007. Yes, really, 2007. Neil has asked them politely to stop spamming him. He’s explained he’s not actually using their software. They appear to be incapable of running a suppression list, despite telling him 3 times that they have removed his address.
Showing much more restraint than I would have with a sender who couldn’t stop sending me email, Neil gave them years to fix their process before blogging about his experiences. Instead of fixing their broken process they instead responded to his blog post insisting their mail wasn’t spam because they weren’t sending Viagra mail or 3rd party offers.
We can argue about the definition of opt-in, we can argue about whether registration is permission, we can argue about a lot of things, but when the recipients says “stop sending me email” and a sender says “we’ll stop sending you email” and then fails to actually stop sending email I think the recipient is fully justified in calling the email spam. Sorry spamfighter.com, your process is broken and your inability to fix it 2 years after the brokenness was brought to your attention does not give anyone a good impression.
Every email sender should have the ability to stop sending mail to recipients. If that’s not currently possible with your technology, it should be a very high development priority.

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Registration is not permission

“But we only mail people who registered at our website! How can they say we’re spamming?”
In those cases where website registration includes notice that the recipient will be added to a list, and / or the recipient receives an email informing them of the type of email they have agreed to receive there is some permission involved. Without any notice, however, there is no permission. Senders must tell the recipient they should expect to receive mail at the time of registration (or shortly thereafter) otherwise there is not even any pretense of opt-in associated with that registration.
Take, for example, a photographers website. The photographer took photos at a friend’s wedding and put them up on a website for the friend and guests to see. Guests were able to purchase photos directly from the site, if they so desired. In order to control access, the photographer required users to register on the site, including an email address.
None of this is bad. It’s all standard and reasonably good practice.
Unfortunately, the photographer seems to have fallen into the fallacy that everyone who registers at a website wants to receive mail from the website as this morning I received mail from “Kate and Al’s Photos <pictage@pictage.example.com>.” It includes this disclaimer on the bottom:

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Links for 9/2/09

People are still talking about the White House spamming. At Al Iverson’s Spam Resource there are two posts, one from Jaren Angerbauer titled Guest Post: Email and the White House and another from Al himself titled White House Spam, Signup Forgery, and GovDelivery. Both are insightful discussions of the spam that the White House has been sending. Over at ReturnPath, Stephanie Miller talks about how the publicity surrounding the spam is great PR for permission.
Stefan Pollard has an article at ClickZ looking at how an apology email in response to a recipient visible email mistake can actually make the fallout worse.
Web Ink Now documents one recipient’s experience with a bad, but all too common, subscription practice.
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Don’t forget to participate in the DKIM implementation survey. For ESPs. For ISPs. Check back next week for results.

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