Should you respond to complaints

David Spinks asks on twitter:

Should you ever contact someone who made an abuse complaint about your newsletter to find out why

My answer was: It depends, but it’s too complicated to explain in 140 characters.

I don’t suggest responding to people who hit the “this is spam” button as a way of complaining. FBLs are complaints, but they are people who don’t necessarily want to engage with you. If they wanted to engage they would have contacted you.
It’s a little trickier when you get complaints directly from recipients. There are a number of reasons people might send you a complaint directly: to honestly engage in a discussion about your mail, to try and track down who might be selling or signing up their email address or to vent their anger at bulk mailers in general.
You can’t always identify which type of recipient just from their initial email, but there are some hints. Complaints cc’d to dozens of email addresses generally aren’t looking for a response, they just want those evil spammers disconnected. Responses to this group of complainers will often be published on mailing lists, newsgroups or on websites. Attempting to engage them usually ends badly for everyone but the complainer.  (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4)
On the other hand, there are folks who are contacting you because they think you care about your network and will want to stop abuse from happening. My complaints, for instance, are often only sent to places I think will care. I’m not going to waste my time sending in a complaint to some place that just deletes them. So they tend to be very short and it can be productive to engage with them.

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Email is not direct mail

Had an interesting talk with a colleague at a BBQ this weekend. He was at a large ISP and then moved on to do delivery at a large email marketing company. This marketing company was started by a very successful direct (snail mail) marketer. The CEO believed totally in testing and they measured everything. They knew what colors provoked a better response and which fonts were better received by recipients.
But this wasn’t always enough. They had some spotty delivery and my friend was hired to try and solve the delivery problems. He had some luck and did fix a number of things, but there was a deeper issue he couldn’t address: that email is not direct mail. The types of testing done is the type of testing for direct mail. They were so focused on getting the best response to a particular offer they refused to consider tweaking an offer from their “proven ideal” to stop triggering content filters at some large ISPs. So their ideal offers would sometimes end up in the inbox and sometimes in the bulk folder and sometimes just disappear.
With direct mail, the USPS is required by law to deliver mail to the addressee. Not only that there are a lot of barriers put up to prevent (or discourage) recipients to opt-out of receiving direct mail. This isn’t the case in email. Not only is their no requirement for an ISP to deliver email to recipients, there is actually a law that says that recipients must be able to opt-out from receiving future emails.
Direct marketers are used to having a lot of freedom and control over their mail. They can buy and sell address lists and send almost anything they want without having anyone tell them they can’t. That mindset translates badly into the email space where the ISPs and the recipients have a lot of control over their incoming email. It means that senders with the absolute perfect test copy see delivery problems because their perfect copy looks just like something a spammer would do and gets caught in content filters. It means they come into email and try to buy a list and discover that while it may be financially viable, they have to deal with angry upstreams, blocks at recipient ISPs and sometimes a Spamhaus listing.
Email isn’t the same as direct mail and attempting to map direct mail techniques onto email usually doesn’t work.

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Creating effective links

CampaignMonitor blogged today about an email they sent out that triggered the Thunderbird “this might be a scam” filter.

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Alphabetical spammers

There have been a couple posts recently about a paper presented at the Fifth Conference on Email and Spam (CEAS). The paper showed how addresses beginning with different letters get different volumes of spam.
But this post is not really about the paper, although it is an interesting academic review of spam, it is more about a memory that the discussions triggered.
Long ago I was handling the abuse desk at the very large network provider. This was in the days before Feedback loops, so every complaint was an actual forwarded email from a recipient. Generally, we saw a couple dozen complaints about any individual spam problem. Not a huge volume by any means, but that meant that any volume of complaints was significant.
One afternoon I started seeing a spike in complaints about a customer who never received complaints before. I started looking a little deeper and discovered we had around 50 complaints about this mailing, many from people I knew, and all from individuals at domains that started with A. This was one of the few times we actually pulled the plug in the middle of a mailing.
I still remember going to my boss suggesting this was something to take action on now because we had over 50 complaints and they were still in the A‘s! The customer was mortified that the guaranteed opt-in list they purchased was so bad and promised never to spam again.
Have a good weekend everyone.

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