Opting out of “service” messages

A frequent question in a number of deliverability spaces is how to tell if a message is transactional or marketing. In most cases the decision is related to whether or not to respect an unsubscribe request. All too often companies decide that their messages are too important to allow someone to opt-out of. The problem is, in some cases, there is no longer a customer relationship to send notices about.

Picture of a stream in Dublin, Ireland

This came up because it’s been just about a year now since I unsubscribed from most of my US based commercial lists. (Yes, we’ve been in Dublin more than a year now!). Because it’s been a year I’m getting a lot of “transactional” messages. Many of them are reminding me to log into my account to see my current rewards level. Others are offering me coupons if I come back.

These aren’t transactional messages, they have nothing to do with any transactions I’ve made. They’re spam, plain and simple. They violate CAN SPAM, as I have opted out from mail from those companies. I’ve not made any purchases from those companies in more than a year.

But, I’ve seen first hand how marketing departments justify emails like this as ‘transactional.’ This is also the time where they start talking about the 80/20 rule that some spammer made up to justify calling their marketing mail spam. Then they don’t let you actually opt-out of this message because they’re “account messages.”

I can’t actually affect delivery of this kind of mail as I’m not at one of the commercial providers. But, if I were, you can bet I’d be reporting each and every one of these messages as spam. Even if it only taught the provider to put this mail in my spam folder, it’s still better than getting mail that I have asked to no longer receive but am still receiving.

Seriously, marketers, at some point you’re going to have to stop biting the apple. When recipients tell you to stop mailing them, take that as an instruction that you should stop mailing them. Continuing to mail people who’ve opted out only injures your reputation and your overall delivery.

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Unsubscribe means unsubscribe

But, unfortunately, some senders don’t actually think unsubscribe means stop sending mail.
Today, for instance, the nice folks at The Container Store sent me an email with an “important update to my POP! account”

Yes, that’s an address I gave them. But I don’t have any record of setting up an account. I was on their mailing list for all of 4 emails back in November 2016 before unsubscribing. But, they’ve decided they can email me despite my unsubscribe request.
They’ve cloaked this as an “Important Account Update” about some account I don’t have. In fact, when I go to their website and try and see what this oh so important account is about they tell me:


I understand legitimate account notifications might be an acceptable excuse to send mail even after the recipient opted out. This, however, was done extremely poorly. There is no record of the account that they are sending me information about. Neither the company nor I have any record of this account of mine.
At a minimum the emails should have only be sent to the folks that actually had an account. But, they weren’t.
I also have some issues with a company requiring recipients to accept email in order to continue using reward points. As a recipient, if I wanted what they were offering I might go ahead and continue receiving emails. But, I might not. It would all depend on how aggressive their email program is and how good the rewards are. As a deliverability consultant, this strikes me as a great way to create a mailing list full of unengaged users. Unengaged users lead to spam foldering and eventual failure of an email marketing program.
Whatever some executives think, and having been in this industry for a decade and I half I’m sure this is coming from the top down, this is not a good way to build an email program. You really can’t force folks to accept your email. ISPs are too protective of their users to make that a viable strategy.

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It’s not marketing, it’s spam

There are times when I hesitate to call what marketers do “spam.” I can use the euphemisms with the best of ’em. “Cold emails” “Targeted Marketing” “B2B marketing.”

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Spam is never timely nor relevant

One of the ongoing recommendations to improve deliverability is to send email that is timely and relevant to the recipient. The idea being that if you send mail a recipient wants, they’re more likely to interact with it in a way that signals to the mailbox provider that the message is wanted. The baseline for that, at least whenever I’ve talked about timely and relevant, is that the recipient asked for mail from you in the first place.

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