Recipients need to be able to unsubscribe

The The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced today that Plentyoffish Media paid a $48,000 fine for CASL violations. According to the  CRTC news release, Plentyoffish Media was failing to allow consumers to unsubscribe from mail in compliance with CASL.
CASL requires that any commercial electronic email message contain an easy and free unsubscribe mechanism. Plentyoffish sent mail to its members without an unsubscribe mechanism. According to their webpage (HT: Sanket) there were some messages that users were unable to opt-out of without closing their account.

You can stop message notifications (sent out when you get a message) in Mail Settings. Unfortunately you cannot stop the “latest match” emails – if these are a problem we’ll delete your account upon request. PoF FAQ.

There are a couple of takeaways here.
The first is that, again, the CRTC did not impose the highest fine possible. When the law came into effect, there were some concerns that the CRTC would be driving companies out of business by imposing maximum fines for CASL violations. While we only have two enforcement actions, neither of them involved the maximum fine, even when there was a blatant violation of the law. This isn’t a law being enforced in a way that is going to destroy email marketing a we know it. Instead, the law is being used to protect consumer interests.
The other is more a more general point. Some senders don’t want to provide opt-outs for customers. This sounds great for the sender. But failing to offer an unsubscribe link from mail can result in delivery problems. The free webmail providers and many of the cable companies track “this is spam” hits and automatically direct future mail from that sender to the recipient’s bulk folder. Recipients can also create filters and totally block mail from senders.
When senders control the opt-out, rather than relying on FBLs and complaints, it gives them more control over their mail stream. They can attempt to re-engage users through non-email channels and recapture that subscriber at a later date. When the mail is going to the bulk folder based on user filters, the user has to actively change the filter to start receiving the mail again.
Overall, letting recipients unsubscribe, even from mail senders don’t think they should unsubscribe from is a net benefit to senders. In the case of Plentyoffish Media, it would have saved them nearly 50,000 dollars.

When spam filters fail
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July 2014: The month in email

We continue to be busy with really interesting client work. Look for some new posts and white papers to come out of this research over the next few months, but for now blogging has been a bit light while we’re working hard. In parallel with our busy times, we have also been pondering the ways in which the email world illustrates the classic bon mot  “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, and we’ve been revisiting some posts from a few years ago to examine this.
We started July with a nod to a good subscription experience just as CASL, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation went into effect on Canada Day. While companies have another 17 months to put these provisions into practice, it’s a good reminder that periodic re-engagement with customers can be very effective in helping you maintain high-quality subscriber lists. We talked a bit more about CASL here and what protections the law intends.
In stark contrast, we posted about an organization that is doing a less-than-stellar job making sure they’re only sending wanted email. The Direct Marketing Association is a terrific resource and member organization for marketers across industries and channels, but their email marketing practices don’t always live up to their mission of “Advancing and Protecting Responsible Data-Driven Marketing”, and we explored some ways in which they might improve this.
Those of you who have been reading this blog for any time at all know that we tend to talk about wanted mail and unwanted mail rather than the more general category of spam. Marketers tend to think their mail can’t possibly be spam if it’s not offering Viagra or phishing for credit card information, but that’s not really the point — if a customer doesn’t want to read your email about new mountain bikes, even if they bought a mountain bike from you three years ago, that’s unwanted email. Here’s a post we revisited about why customers might not want your mail, and a new post about engagement.
One risk of sending unwanted email, of course, is that customers complain, and that will affect your delivery going forward. We revisited a post about feedback loops, and also talked a bit about addressing delivery problems as they come up rather than waiting for them to resolve on their own (mostly, they won’t!)
I also proposed a bit of a thought experiment around monetizing the complaint stream, and followed up with a second post. There are some good points in the comments of those posts, but mostly I think it’s an interesting solution to addressing risk and abuse at ESPs.
Finally, Steve wrote a short post about our new mail servers and how quickly spammers descended as we set those up. It’s a constant battle!

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CASL enforcement

As most people know, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) went into effect July 1 of this year. This month, the CRTC concluded its first investigation.

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Some email related news

A couple links to relevant things that are happening in email.
M3AAWG released the Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link) doc this week. This is the result of 4 years worth of work by a whole lot of people at M3AAWG. I was a part of the working group (“doc champion” in M3AAWG parlance) and want to thank everyone who was involved and contributed to the process. I am very excited this was approved and published so people can take advantage of the collective wisdom of M3AAWG participants.
In other announcements, Gmail announced today on their Google+ page that that they were putting a new “unsubscribe” link next to the sender name when mail is delivered to the Promotions, Social or Forums tab. This appears to be the official announcement of the functionality they announced at the SF M3AAWG last February. It likely means that all users are currently getting the “unsubscribe” link. What Gmail doesn’t mention in that blog post is that this functionality uses the “List-Unsubscribe” header, not the link in the email, but I don’t think anyone except bulk mailers really care about how it’s being done, just that it is.
Also today Gmail announced they were going to recognize usernames with non-Latin or accented characters in the name. Eventually, they claim, they’ll also allow people to get Gmail addresses with accented characters.

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