B2B mail and compliance failures

This morning I got an email to a tagged address. The tag matched the company so it’s very likely I did actually sign up. Digging back through my mailbox, I see one previous email to that account – back in 2008.

2008.

One email.

Who knows why I signed up and gave them an email address. Maybe I made a comment on their website. Or perhaps I signed up while investigating something for a client. I certainly don’t know. Given there is one email, I clearly unsubscribed.

If the address hadn’t been tagged, I would have assumed it was just another giant company purchasing addresses and sending out spam. In fact, it’s quite possible that many of the subscribers thought that this was simply spam. One interesting thing, though, is this is primarily B2B mail. It’s very unlikely that their ESPs monitoring saw anything unusual with the mailing. And if they did, it’s possible there’s not enough evidence the customer is violating the AUP.

Monitoring B2B deliverability it a challenge in any situation. Most of the ways ESPs monitor customers delivery don’t work in a B2B context. There aren’t FBLs for business domains. The business user sometimes does have a “this is spam” button and that data is used to tune filters. Sometimes the filters are the individual bayesian filters built into the mail client. Other times, the filters feed back to the filter maintainer and affect the mail coming into the business and other users of the filter. That data isn’t sent by FBL to the sender.

What does this mean? It means that how compliance monitors and identifies spam doesn’t work very well in when their customers are focused on the B2B market. Senders in the B2B space think they don’t have to actually get permission before they send. As compliance we’ve enforced that because their complaints are low. The complaints are low not because people don’t want the mail, but because there’s no way to get complaints from B2B mail.

Lack of negative feedback doesn’t mean the mail is good. It just means there’s no pathway for the feedback. Mail sent to lists of purchased email addresses, or addresses harvested off LinkedIn may not have high complaint rates or high bounce rates. But that doesn’t make the mail good, or wanted.

The remedy for B2B spam is blocking. B2B mailers don’t get the ability to tune their mail based on engagement or other factors like they can with B2C. Send B2B spam, get blocked.

Gradual DMARC Rollout
Filters working as intended

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Permission and B2B spam

Two of the very first posts I wrote on the blog were about permission (part 1, part 2). Re-reading those posts is interesting. Experience has taught me that recipients are much more forgiving of implicit opt-in than that post implies.
The chance in recipient expectations doesn’t mean, however, that permission isn’t important or required. In fact, The Verge reported on a chatbot that will waste the time of spammers. Users who are fed up with spam can forward their message to Re:Scam and bots will answer the mail.
I cannot tell you how tempted I am to forward all those “Hey, just give me 10 minutes of your time…” emails I get from B2B spammers. I know, those are actually bots, but there is lovely symmetry in bots bothering one another and leaving us humans out of it.

Speaking of those annoying emails, I tweeted about one (with horrible English…) last week. I tagged the company in question and they asked for an example. After I sent it, they did nothing, and I continued to get mail. Because of course I did.
These types of messages are exactly why permission is so critical for controlling spam. Way more companies can buy my email address and add me to their spam automation software than I can opt-out of in any reasonable time frame. My inbox, particularly my business inbox, is where I do business. It’s where I talk with clients, potential clients, customers and, yes, even vendors. But every unsolicited email wastes my time.
It’s not even that the mail is simply unwanted. I get mail I don’t want regularly. Collecting white papers for my library, RSVPing to events, joining webinars all result in me getting added to companies’ mailing lists. That’s fair, I gave them an email address I’ll unsubscribe.
The B2B companies who buy my address are different. They’re spamming and they understand that. The vendors who sell the automation filters tell their customers how to avoid spam filters. Spammers are told to use different domains for the unsolicited mail and their opt-in mail to avoid blocking. The software plugs into Google and G Suite account because very few companies will block Google IPs.
I’ve had many of these companies attempt to pay me to fix their delivery problems. But, in this case there’s nothing to fix. Yes, your mail is being blocked. No, I can’t help. There is nothing I can say to a filtering company or ISP or company to make them list that block. The mail is unwanted and it’s unsolicited.
The way to get mail unblocked is to demonstrate the mail is wanted. If you can’t do that, well, the filters are working as intended.
 

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If I can't tell, it's spam

Judging by the amount of B2B spams I’ve gotten this past week, a number of businesses got bright, shiny new email programs for Christmas. “Like to set up a call with you…” “Just need 10 minutes of your time to explore…” “Love to jump on a call and tell you about our product…”
That’s just the mail that comes into my personal address. There’s also a raft of mail coming into our contact address. The majority of those are trying to sell me FB or Twitter followers, although Instagram is rising in the ranks. Some of those messages are kinda funny, though. They try so hard to pretend there’s a real person who really did look at our website and who really has a comment.
Most of the time it’s pretty obvious that it’s not from a human. But every once in a while a message comes in that might be from a real person. I’ve finally decided that if I have any question if a message was written by a human or a bot, it will be treated as written by a bot.
Unfair? Maybe. But I’m a small business owner and a consultant; I don’t have tons of spare time to sit around letting folks pitch me on their business. I don’t think I’m actually that unusual when it comes to entrepreneurs. We’re busy, we don’t like distractions and we go out and search for the things we actually do need.

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Not fooling anyone…

A question came up on the Women of Email Facebook page about sending cold B2B emails. This is one of those areas I have strong opinions about, mostly because I am so tired of getting deceptive and unending messages from folks.
Realistically, cold emailing isn’t going to stop just because recipients hate receiving it. We haven’t wiped out spam in 20+ years, we’re not going to manage it for this one tiny piece. But I do think there are things senders can do to minimize the amount of frustration their spam creates.

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