Ask Laura: Is it spam?

MarinHeadlandsSmall

Dear Laura,

I’ve been having a discussion with a colleague who is particularly frustrated by unwanted email he gets from retailers. Specifically, these are retailers who he’s never given an email address, but whose sites he’s browsed recently. He understands how retargeting works with web ads, but questions if it’s really acceptable to retarget in the email channel or if that violates CAN-SPAM or other anti-spam legislation.

I think it’s an interesting discussion, but I’m pretty sure that my colleague is wrong. These companies can retarget because people opt-in to “partner” emails all the time, and “partners” often equals “retargeters”. It’s not spam, and it’s not in violation of CAN-SPAM. 

So what do you think? Spam or not-spam?

Yours in contradictions,

Schrödinger’s Box-of-Spam

Dear Schrödy,
I understand this paradox of which you speak. Let me explain the process a bit for those who don’t.

Through email a retargeter sets a cookie on a machine, linking the web browser to the email address that received the cookie. As people use that web browser to surf, they can land on sites that belong to the retargeter’s customers. This triggers a process that can result in the address owner receiving mail. This mail is often unexpected and sometimes unwanted from the website that’s been browsed.

This may seem like a violation of CAN-SPAM, but that law doesn’t define spam as unexpected or unwanted email. CAN-SPAM says you can send mail to anyone until they tell you to stop. That mail has to meet certain criteria (opt-out, no falsified headers, clearly marked as advertising), but there is nothing in CAN-SPAM that prohibits buying and selling of lists or email addresses or even sending mails to people who simply visit your website.

ISP standards are different than legal standards and there is extensive case law stating that ISPs can block whatever mail they deem problematic. This case law predates CAN-SPAM and was not overruled by CAN-SPAM.

Sending mail to lists that you purchased, rather than directly collected opt-ins, is generally frowned upon by most of the folks handling filters, both at the ISP level and the commercial filter levels. From the ISP perspective, what the recipient wants is the gold standard. ISPs, particularly the free webmail providers, make money the longer the user stays in the inbox. They want the user to like visiting the inbox, so they filter mail they believe (through analysis of the user and analysis of the overall mail coming into the ISP) is unwanted.

It is certainly legal to use retargeting sites, partner sites or co-registration sites to collect permission to send mail to people. Some of them even are up front about the permission. But the reality is that many of the “partner” and “co-reg” and “database” sites are cesspools of permission. It might be permission on the outside, in that the person willingly gave their email address to the website. But it’s not real permission because they didn’t know what they were consenting to.

A few months ago I was investigating an address source for a client and spent nearly an hour reading the various terms and conditions pages and privacy policy pages. I was trying to determine if the address source was allowed to sell addresses to my client. I never could quite interpret the legalese enough to figure it out. What was clear was that your average petition signer would not realize they were agreeing to have their address sold.

So is it spam? Yes and no. Is it a best practice for customer acquisition and retention? Absolutely not. Will it ultimately impact deliverability for the brand? I think so, and I advise my clients not to do it.

Hope this helps,
Laura

Confused about delivery in general? Trying to keep up on changing policies and terminology? Need some Email 101 basics? This is the place to ask. We can’t answer specific questions about your server configuration or look at your message structure for the column (please get in touch if you’d like our help with more technical or forensic investigations!), but we’d love to answer your questions about how email works, trends in the industry, or the joys and challenges of cohabiting with felines.

Related Posts

Ugg, a spammer.

I’ve written before about how there is some (I’m sure lovely) woman in the UK who has been connected to my email address. I get a lot of mail for her. Mostly spam. She doesn’t seem to be using the address, but I regularly get mail addressed to MRS. LAURA CORBISHLEY (all caps, always). Typically these messages are advertising various UK stores and products. Sometimes they’re mortgage offers. A few have been sweepstakes only open to UK residents.
ShadyGuyWebsite
I generally forward these spams off to various blocklists with the note it’s my “UK spamtrap” and they take whatever actions seem appropriate to them.
2016-03-21_14-33-39Today, though, I got my first US spam to Mrs. Laura Corbishly. From a Yesmail customer called sanuk.com. I’m getting a website error (they get smacked for spamming already?) but a little research tells me this is shoe company that owns a bunch of brands, including Ugg.
Yes, Ugg a Spammer. They even even have a disclaimer at the bottom of the email telling me they’re a spammer!
2016-03-21_14-35-54
Not so much, no. It appears, though, that the data brokers selling Mrs. Corbishley’s name connected to my email address have figured out that no one ever actually acts on any of their UK offers. So now they’re selling into the US market in hopes that they might entice a purchase?
On a purely nosy level, I’d love to know who was selling the address. First off, I’d love to know where they got this info in the first place. Secondly, what horrible database are they using that keeps name data in all caps? (When I get email to this trap I think they’re shouting at me, as if I’m the one who is wrong about my name. Maybe they think if they yell at me loud enough will I decide I really am the happy wife of Mr. Corbishley of Swindon, UK. )
I do tell clients that it’s useful to remind customers that they signed up for mail, especially if they haven’t mailed for a while. So I know not every email with a “you opted in” reminder is spam, but I only notice those things when I haven’t opted in. It’s something I mostly gloss over if I really did opt-in. I wonder if this is how other folks react to “you opted in” notices, too.
I do recommend the reminder be much more specific than “you opted in at our website.” Give the user a date, a time, something that isn’t just something any company can, and many do, make up.
 
 

Read More

Dr. Livingston, I presume?

I linked to Al’s post about misdirected emails and how annoying it is for people who receive emails. I’ve previously talked about the problems associated with not handling misdirected emails properly.
It’s really annoying getting email that you never signed up for. For instance, one of my email addresses gets quite a bit of misdirected email. Oddly enough, much of this mail comes addressed to “Mrs. Christine Stelfox” and advertises various services. The problem is, I’m not Mrs. Christine Stelfox and I don’t live in the UK.
I’ve been getting this misdirected email for a while. In fact, I’ve even tried to track down the source of this just to make it stop. But I can’t seem to get that to happen. The senders tell me simply that I opted in, and that if I want to opt-out, here’s a link. Sometimes I have more luck contacting ESPs, but not always.
In fact, recently I reported spam to Mrs. Stelfox to a European based ESP. I got a response from their delivery head, who asked a lot of questions about the email address. What kind of spamtrap was it? How long had I had it? Is it possible it’s a recycled address? It’s really not, though. It’s an address I’ve had since early 1994, and it’s not really a trap as I still actually use if for some me. But I’ve not used it for commercial email since sometime in the late ’90s. And I’ve certainly never claimed to be a Mrs. Stelfox.
This really isn’t a case where I forgot I signed up. This isn’t a case where someone had the address before me. This is either some confused person using my address or some company in the UK selling my email address as belonging to someone else. I’ve tried to track this down in the past to get off the list of whomever is selling this address. But I’ve never had any luck.
There isn’t a lot of recourse here. I can continue to unsubscribe the addresses, but that doesn’t resolve the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that many marketers think it’s acceptable to purchase (or append) email addresses with no regard for the fact that sometimes their data suppliers are wrong.
It’s not just this one address, either. Another one of my email addresses is being sold as “Mrs. Laura Corbishley” of the UK as well. Sometimes I get the same spam to Mrs. Christine Stelfox and Mrs. Laura Corbishley. Other times I get different spams to each address, possibly because Mrs. Stelfox is behind some commercial email filters and Mrs. Corbishley isn’t.
Misdirected emails are annoying. They’re a problem for the people who keep getting them and can’t make them stop. It’s really important that ESPs, companies that send email and companies that sell email addresses have some way to make that mail stop. It doesn’t matter that half a dozen ESPs have put Mrs. Stelfox in their suppression list. Senders are still purchasing that data and are wasting their money. I am still getting spam.
 
 
 

Read More

Spam is about invading other people's space

At the recent Sendgrid Emailmatter’s conference Sally Lehman advised attendees to “Treat someone’s inbox like it was their home.” This is advice I’ve been giving clients for a long time. I think it’s even more relevant now as so many people have data enabled phones and are checking email so frequently. It’s not just their home, it’s their personal space they can take with them.
Seanan McGuire, a friend and NY Times bestselling author, wrote a blog post today about how she views promotion and marketing as an artist and someone who is expected to promote her work. She also talks about what it feels like to be a target of promotion and offers some advice about how to promote your products online.  She talks about how she, as an author and creative type, is expected to do some level of self promotion and how that promotion is done in her space – whether that space be on twitter or her blog.

Read More