Jane! Stop this crazy thing!

One of the consequences of moving to Ireland is I’m unsubscribing from most commercial mail, including some lists I’ve been on for a decade or more. Sadly, many of the companies don’t ship to Ireland, or their shipping costs are prohibitively expensive. Even if I wanted to purchase from them, I couldn’t.

This process has made me realise how horrible many company’s unsubscribe processes are. Look, I get it, having people leave your list is no fun. Losing subscribers is not what we’re in this for. But, sometimes, sometimes you just have to let them go. But there are senders out there that continue to mail me after I have unsubscribed.

In one case, every time I unsubscribe I get a note “you’ve been unsubscribed from company <list name>.” There is no option available for me to unsubscribe from all company publications. At this point I’ve submitted at least 3 separate unsubscribe requests, and the company is still mailing me. This is, in fact, a CAN SPAM violation.

In both the original law and the rulemaking from the FTC opt out requests are to the “sender” of the commercial email message. We can rules lawyer about how different divisions of a company may be different senders, or how different messages are coming from different people inside the company. In this case, though, the email address in the From: line of the message is identical. They aren’t different “senders” they’re the exact same sender.

The DMA fought long and hard to make sure CAN SPAM was an opt-out law. They argued that every company should have  the opportunity to try and sell consumers something. “We call it the ‘one bite at the apple’ rule,” [Patricia Faley of the Direct Marketing Association] says. “Give me one chance to show you what I have to offer you, and if you don’t like it, then I won’t contact you again.”(Congress has hard time stomaching e-mail spam).  Unfortunately, all too many companies forget the won’t contact you again piece.

In fact, just yesterday I received email from the DMA of Northern California that was in blatant violation of their one-bite rule and CAN SPAM. They got the address from me because I spoke on a panel at a meeting back in 2002 or 2003. I never actually opted in, but as part of the event they required every attendee to give them a business card. After I got the first message I unsubscribed. Yes, the unsubscribe request was more than 15 years ago. That doesn’t make it invalid.

Worse for the DMA, the address is now a spamtrap. Knowing who was at the meeting with me, that wasn’t the only address turned into a spamtrap.

If someone goes through the trouble to opt out of your mail, listen to them. Respect their no. Senders who don’t create a preference center need to accept that when a recipient opts out of one email, then the recipient has opted out of all emails. Sure, if you have a preference center, they can pick and choose and maybe they will want to stay on the recipe list without staying on the sales list. But lacking that facility unsubscribe means unsubscribe from everything.

Likewise, opt-outs don’t expire! If someone says to stop mailing them and don’t contact them again, you stop mailing them and don’t contact them again. The DMA should know better. They’re supposed to be industry leaders in best practices. Unfortunately, they failed.

Email only works because senders respect recipients. Both of these examples show marketers that haven’t bothered to actually consider their recipients. You can’t respect someone you haven’t even thought about.

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Ask Laura: Confused about CAN SPAM

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Where did you get my address?

Both Steve and I are trying to get answers from Amazon, Target and Epsilon about how Target acquired our Amazon specific email addresses. Target phone reps told us the mail we got was a phish, Epsilon is refusing to acknowledge Target is a customer and Amazon has promised us “they’re looking into it.”
Meanwhile, an address of mine was transferred from one customer of an ESP to another customer of the same ESP. At first I was told I must have signed up for the mail; as proof I was provided with the data I supposedly signed up. When I explained no that wasn’t true, the abuse desk told me they had discovered there was a mistake and that “These two clients use the same 3rd party ESP and they had mixed the files.” I’m not actually sure who “they” refers to, but as long as they’ve untangled the files I am not going to argue. The sad part is that it took an escalation to Return Path (the IP sending the mail is certified) to get anyone to actually respond to my report of an address given to Company A being mailed by Company B.
On the flip side, mail showed up today that actually had a link for “how was I added?”
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When you click on the link it shows exactly where the address came from and when it was added to the list.
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It would be great if more companies provided this information to their recipients. I think it would probably decrease spam reports and make consumers feel more comfortable about how companies are collecting and using information.

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Don't bother unsubscribing

In the early years of the spam problem, a common piece of advice was to never unsubscribe. At the time, this made a lot of sense. Multiple anti-spammers documented spammers harvesting addresses from unsubscribe forms. This activity tapered off around 2000 or so, although the myth persisted for much longer.

These days, there isn’t much harm in unsubscribing. I even spent a full month unsubscribing from spam at one of my dormant accounts (Yes, spam is still a problem). While the graph shows an initial increase in spam, levels dropped for the next few months. By the time I cancelled the account in 2017, spam levels were at very low. I don’t know if the decrease was due to the unsubscribing or if there were improvements in the filtering appliance the ISP used.
More recently the biggest problem is senders that don’t honor unsubscribes. There are a lot of reasons this can happen and they’re not all malicious. Still, too many companies don’t care enough to actually make sure their unsubscribe process is working. I’ve had way too many companies “lose” unsubscribe requests, sometimes years after I asked them to stop. I expect many of these cases are accidents. They switch ESPs and decide or forget or otherwise fail to transfer unsubscribes to the new ESP. But, in other cases, there doesn’t seem to be any ESP change. It appears the companies think that they can reactivate unsubscribes at some point (pro tip: there is no expiration on legally required unsubscribe requests).
All of this leads to my current recommendation: yeah, unsub if you feel like it, it’s unlikely to hurt, and it’s possible it will help. But, don’t expect them to actually work permanently. Companies just don’t care enough to make them permanent.
 
 

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