The cyber monday inundation of mail has hit my mailbox. There’s been a clear increase in marketing mail over the last week. Unfortunately for those marketers, it’s too much and I am just scanning subject lines and marking as read. I don’t have the time to read all this mail.
Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet.
If the ISPs would just tell us what they want us to do, we’ll do it.
The ISPs have told senders what they want them to do. They want senders to stop sending mail that their users don’t want. It is a very simple statement.
Stop sending spam.
For many senders, however, it’s not enough. “Tell us exactly what we need to do to stop sending spam. What complaint rates must we be under? What bounce rates do we have to be under? How do you want us to do this?” By this point in the conversation the ISP person is mentally rolling their eyes and looking for a way to escape the conversation.
The ISPs don’t want to tell senders how to behave, they want senders to start behaving. Stop sending spam should be all they need to tell senders.
Senders who ask for ISPs to tell them how to stop sending mail recipients think is spam are looking for specific thresholds they can stay under. They’re not really interested in actually sending wanted mail, they’re interested in sending good-enough mail, where good-enough mail is simply mail that gets to the inbox.
Want to know why ISPs don’t think much of many senders? Because the senders are not visibly taking any stand against abuse. I know there are a lot of senders out there who stop a lot of spam from ever leaving their systems, but there’s also a lot of unwanted mail that goes out, too. Some of that mail is even spam by any definition of the word. All the ISPs can see is the spam that gets through, and then they hear just tell us what to do and we’ll do it. From an ISP perspective, this means the senders only care about the thresholds and getting in under the ISPs’ radars.
Senders need to take more responsibility for the mail that goes out over their networks.
What do I mean by this? I mean senders need to stop waiting for the ISPs to define good practices. Senders need to implement standards and good practices just because they’re good practices, not because the ISPs are dictating the practices. Senders need to stop customers from doing bad things, and dump them if they won’t stop. Senders need to stop relying on ISPs for specific answers to why mail is being blocked. Senders need to take responsibility for the mail going across their networks.
It’s time for senders to grow up and stop relying on others for guidance. They shouldn’t implement good practices just because the ISPs tell them to, but instead should implement good practices because they are good practices.
I cannot tell you how many times over the last 10 years I’ve been talking to someone with a problem and had them tell me “but I’m a legitimate email marketer.” Most of them have at least one serious problem, from upstreams that are ready to terminate them for spamming through widespread blocking. In fact, the practices of most companies who proclaim “we’re legitimate email marketers” are so bad that the phrase has entered the lexicon as a sign that the company is attempting to surf the gray area between commercial email and spam as close to the spam side of that territory as possible.
What do I mean by that? I mean that the address collection practices and the mailing processes used by self-proclaimed legitimate email marketers are sloppy. They don’t really care about individual recipients, they just care about the numbers. They buy addresses, they use affiliates, they dip whole limbs in the co-reg pool; all told their subscription practices are very sloppy. Because they didn’t scrape or harvest the email address, they feel justified in claiming the recipient asked for it and that they are legitimate.
They don’t really care that they’re mailing people who don’t want their mail and really never asked to receive it. What kinds of practices am I talking about?
Buying co-reg lists. “But the customer signed up, made a purchase, took an online quiz and the privacy policy says their address can be shared.” The recipient doesn’t care that they agreed to have their email address handed out to all and sundry, they don’t want that mail.
Arguing with subscribers. “But all those people who labeled my mail as spam actually subscribed!!!” Any time a mailer has to argue with a subscriber about the validity of the subscription, there is a problem with the subscription process. If the sender and the receiver disagree on whether there was really an opt-in, the senders are rarely given the benefit of the doubt.
Using affiliates to hide their involvement in spam. A number of companies use advertising agencies that outsource acquisition mailings that end up being sent by spammers. These acquisition mailings are sent by the same spammers sending enlargement spam. The advertiser gets all the benefits of spam without any of the consequences.
Knowing that their signup forms are abused but failing to stop the abuse. A few years back I was talking with a large political mailer. They were insisting they were legitimate email marketers but were finding a lot of mail blocked. I mentioned that they were a large target for people forging addresses in their signup form. I explained that mailing people who never asked for mail was probably the source of their delivery problems. They admitted they were probably mailing people who never signed up, but weren’t going to do anything about it as it was good for their bottom line to have so many subscribers.
Self described legitimate email marketers do the bare minimum possible to meet standards. They talk the talk to convince their customers they’re legitimate:
Not having policies restricting the amount of mail any customer or recipient receives may lead to higher spam complaint rates and blocking warns the DMA Email Marketing Council.
HT: Box of Meat