Are FBLs required for a clean mail stream?

A few years ago I would have said that a good mailer could have a good mailing program without necessarily participating in FBL programs. I’m not convinced that’s true any longer. As the mailbox providers and ISPs develop more complex filtering methodologies, it’s important for senders to get any possible feedback from recipients. That press on the this-is-spam button may not actually mean the mail is spam, but it does mean that recipient really didn’t like the message.
Getting the feedback lets a sender fine tune their sending processes and better target what their recipients want to receive.
I do think that senders need to know what users are saying about their email. When users hit the T-i-S button then that is valuable information about how the recipients think about the mail. Senders really on top of things can use positive data (opens and clicks) and negative data (FBLs and unsubscribes) to monitor how wanted their email is and make adjustments to their sending stream.
 
 

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Opting customers in to new programs

Recently, I started getting “1 sale a day!” emails from buy.com. I’ve made purchases from Buy in the past and generally have been content to get emails from them. They’re not always relevant, but hey, it’s relatively non-intrustive marketing.
When they started this new program, they just started mailing: no warning, no introduction, nothing. So I decided to opt out of this mail.
Buy.com has a preference center, and while I was there, I opted out of all email marketing. Why? Because a company that is going to randomly add me to new (daily!) marketing lists is a company I don’t trust any more.
A lot of folks have complained about Amazon doing the same thing. Amazon started a daily deals program and opted in a lot of people without warning, without introduction and without permission.
I get why companies do this. It’s a lot easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. It lets them sell things to people who might never opt-in to that program. And in many areas of direct marketing, consumers have no rights to make the marketing stop. They have no tools to make the marketing stop.
Email is different from many direct marketing channels, though. Many consumers have the tools to make mail stop (filters, this is spam buttons, changing their email address completely) and they do take advantage of them.
Given a marketers job is to extract as much revenue from customers as possible, they can’t respect recipients. They have to treat them as money dispensing machines. But at least in email recipients have some ability to opt-out of the transactions.

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Confirming spam reports

Someone floated the idea of having ISPs confirm that a user really wants to report a mail as spam every time they do so. The original poster was asking for comments and what we thought of such an idea.

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Yahoo FBL problems

Multiple ESPs are reporting that the volume of Yahoo! FBL reports have slowed to a trickle over the last 24 or so hours. While we don’t know exactly what is going on yet, or if it’s on track for being fixed, there does seem to be a problem.
There has been some ongoing maintenance issues with the Yahoo! FBL, where requests for updates and changes weren’t being handled in a timely fashion. Informed speculation was the resources needed to fix the FBL modification weren’t available. The interesting question is if Y! will commit the resources to fix the FBL. I could make arguments either way. But Yahoo! gets the benefit of the this-is-spam button whether or not they send a complaint back to the sender.
5/21 5pm: Both Yahoo and Return Path (who administer the Y! FBL) are aware of the problem and are working on it.
5/21 6:30pm: Reports are flowing again according to multiple sources.

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