One subscription should equal one unsubscription

One of the side effects of using tagged addresses to sign up for things is seeing exactly what companies do with your data once they get it.

For instance, 3 years ago I downloaded a white paper or something from an ESP. That white paper was apparently co-branded and the other company got my email address from the ESP. They’re now sending mail to that address. I unsubscribed from the ESP mail and haven’t gotten anything from them in the last 2 1/2 years.

There are multiple problems with this kind of sharing. The first is that recipients don’t know they’re giving permission for their data to be shared. Maybe it was in the fine print, but hiding permission in terms and condition isn’t real permission.

Compounding the spam is the fact that I only gave one group my email address, but I have to unsubscribe multiple times. To me, this is the same as unsubscribing from one email only to have a sender add me to a different list of theirs.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the only fair way to handle subscriptions in a truly opt-in fashion is that the number of unsubscribes necessary to stop mail should equal the number of subscribes. In my case it’s easy. Every subscription gets a unique address. When I give my address in one place, then I should be able to stop all mail to that address through a single unsubscribe.

I’m not against preference centers. If you want to add me to multiple segments or lists, all you have to do is tell me and let me choose. If you can’t do that, then take an unsubscribe request as a request to remove me from all mail. If you’re in the US, you’re required to do that under CAN SPAM and other laws.

No recipient should have to chase down every company their addresses have been shared with just to opt-out. Companies that share opt-ins for addresses should also share opt-outs. If that’s too much work for you, then how is it any less work for the recipient? You know who you’ve given the address to, I don’t. I just get to unsubscribe any time someone decides to mail the address of mine you gave them.

Otherwise, it’s all just spam.

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Outreach or spam?

This showed up in my mailbox earlier today:
Pluckyou
The tweet in question
pluckyou2
From Crunchbase: “Pluck is an email prospecting tool that gives you the email addresses of the people tweeting about subjects related to your business.”
Prospecting: another name for spamming. Look, I know that you want to sell you’re newest, greatest product to the world. But just because I tweet something with a # that you think is relevant to your product doesn’t mean that I want to get your spam. I also know it’s hard to get attention and find prospects; I’m a small business owner, too and I need to market my own services. But spamming isn’t a good idea. Ever.
There’s been a significant increase in this kind of spam “to help your business” lately. It’s a rare day I don’t get something from some company I’ve never heard of trying to sell me their newest product. It might be something if they tried a contact or two and then went away. But they’ll send mail for weeks or months without getting an answer. Look, silence IS an answer and it means you need to go away and leave your prospects alone.
Unfortunately, there are services out there that sell a product that let you “automatically follow up” with your prospects. Pluck up there uses one of them, as that’s who’s handling all the links in the message. In fact, if you go to the bare domain (qcml.io) they talk a good anti-spam game. “Die, spammers, die.” I reported the message to them. I’m not expecting them to actually do anything, and I’m not expecting a response.
It’s just spam under another name. There’s no pretense that it’s anything else. Even if it’s sent in a way that makes it look like a real person typed the message, like QuickMail offers. “All emails will come straight out of your personal inbox as though you typed them yourself.” As if you typed them yourself.
The worst part is there’s no real way to stop the mail. I can’t unsubscribe. The companies selling the software don’t provide any guidance to their customers about what the law requires. Take the message from Pluck that started the post. It violates CAN SPAM in multiple ways. Moreover, the address they used is not publicly associated with my twitter handle, which means they’re doing some harvesting somewhere. That means treble penalties under CAN SPAM.
I could reply and ask them to stop mailing me. I’ve done that a couple times with a message that says, “Please don’t email me any more.” I’ve got to tell you, some people get really mad when you ask them not to email you. Some just say yes, but others are really offended that you asked them to stop and get abusive. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t ask any more because of that one person who decides to harass, threaten and scream at me. Sure, it’s maybe 1 in 5, but I don’t have the time or energy to figure out who is going to be receptive and who isn’t. I don’t have time for that. No one has time for that.
I’m expecting that filters are going to catch up eventually and these types of mail will be easier to filter out. Until then, though, small business owners like myself are stuck in a place where we have to deal with spam distracting us from our business. At least I get blog content out of it.
 
 
 

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