Stop telling me how great Spamarrest is

Late last year, Al wrote a piece discussing how Spamarrest lost a court case. In the comments on that piece I described how much I really detest Spamarrest because of all the spam I get from Spamarrest users. Every few weeks, someone notices that post again and points it out to Spamarrest users who then come over here to tell me how wonderful Spamarrest is for them.
I Get It. You like Spamarrest because it keeps spam out of your inbox.
The problem is Spamarrest (and any other challenge response setup) contributes to spam in my inbox. I have addresses that get forged into spam all the time. When that happens, I get dozens of Spamarrest challenges, clogging up MY inbox.
I don’t want to do your spam filtering for you. I really don’t. And if you ask me if you should receive a piece of email, I am going to tell you yes. I did that for a while; when I got a challenge from someone I’d answer it in the affirmative. Eventually I got tired of it and sent all mail from @spamarrest.com to /dev/null.
Am I missing out on corresponding with some brilliant and wonderful people? Maybe. But from my perspective, 100% of the confirmation requests I receive from Spamarrest are spam.  I’m just thankful that Spamarrest makes it easy to identify and throw away their requests so I don’t have to handle someone else’s spam load in addition to my own.
This is a long way to say I’m closing comments on the older Spamarrest post, so don’t bother telling me what a great spam filter it is. The same thing that makes it a great spam filter for you makes it a total source of spam for me.

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Spam is not a moral judgement

Mention an email is spam to some senders and watch them dance around trying to explain all the ways they aren’t spammers. At some point, calling an email spam seems to have gone from a statement of fact into some sort of moral judgement on the sender. But calling an email spam is not a moral judgement. It’s just a statement of what a particular recipient thinks of an email.
There are lots of reasons mail can be blocked and not all those reasons are spam related. Sometimes it’s a policy based rejection. Mailbox providers publishing a DMARC record with a reject policy caused a lot of mail to bounce, but none of that was because that user (or that mailing list) was sending spam. Most cable companies prohibit customers from running mail servers on their cable connection and mail from those companies is widely rejected, but that doesn’t mean the mail is spam.
Sometimes a block is because some of the mail is being sent to people who didn’t ask for it or are complaining about it. This doesn’t make the sender a bad person. It doesn’t make the sending company bad. It just means that there is some issue with a part of the marketing program that need to be addressed.
The biggest problem I see is some senders get so invested in convincing receivers, delivery experts and filtering companies that they’re not spammers, that they miss actually fixing the problem. They are so worried that someone might think they’re spammers, they don’t actually listen to what’s being said by the blocking organization, or by their ISP or by their ESP.
Calling email spam isn’t a moral judgement. But, if too many people call a particular email spam, it’s going to be challenging to get that mail to the inbox. Instead of arguing with those people, and the filters that listen to them, a better use of time and energy is fixing the reasons people aren’t liking your email.

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Get an email address, by any means possible

Neil has a post up about the “opt-in” form that we were all confronted with when logging into the hotel wifi at M3AAWG last week.  They aren’t the only hotel asking for email addresses, I’ve seen other folks comment about how they were required to provide an email address AND opt-in to receive email offers before they were allowed onto the hotel network. Mind you, they’re paying the outrageous fees for hotel internet and still being told they must provide an email address.
The addresses given by people who wouldn’t opt-in willingly aren’t going to be worth anything. These are not people who want your mail, they’re only giving you an address because they’re being forced to do so.
I know it is so tempting for marketers to use any methods to get an email address from customers. I recently was dealing with a very poorly delivering list that looked purchased. There were clear typos, invalid domains, non-existent domains, the whole nine yards. Over 20% of the mail was bouncing and what did get delivered wasn’t going to the inbox. I was working through the problem with the ESP before they went to talk to the customer. To my eye, the list looked purchased. Most times lists just don’t look that bad when they are actually opt-in lists. The ESP insisted that the addresses were being collected at their brick and mortar stores at point of sale. I asked if the company was incentivizing address collection, but the ESP didn’t know.
Eventually, we discovered that the retailer in question had set performance indicators such that associates were expected to collect email addresses from 90% of their customers. No wonder the lists looked purchased. I have no doubt that the pressure to give an email address caused some customers to just make up random addresses on the fly. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some associates, after failing to meet the 90% goal, would just enter random addresses in “on behalf of” the customer.
Email is a great way to stay in touch with customers. It is an extremely cost effective and profitable way to market. The caveat is that customers have to want that mail. Coercing a customer to give you an address doesn’t make your marketing better. It just makes your delivery harder. That lowers your overall revenue and decreases profits.
Quantity is not the be all and end all of marketing. This company? They have a great email marketing program, but their address collection is so bad hardly anyone gets to see the mail in the inbox, even the people who would be happy to receive the mail.
For email delivery quality trumps quantity every time.

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The more things change

I was doing some research about the evolution of the this-is-spam button for a blog article. In the middle of it, I found an old NY Times report about spam from 2003.

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