CAN SPAM says I can!

the word spam with a checkmark next to it.

Saw a new disclaimer on mail sent to an address harvested off our website today:

disclaimer: This is an advertisement and a promotional mail-in adherence to the guidelines of CAN-SPAM act 2003. We have clearly mentioned the source id of this mail, also clearly mentioned the subject line, and they are in no way misleading in any form. We have found your email address through our own efforts on the web search and not through any other way. If you find this email unsolicited, please reply with “REMOVE” in the subject line and we will take care that you don’t receive any further promotional mail.

Of course, the “we will take care you don’t receive more” is a blatant lie. They always send more. I mean, I guess they adhere to the absolute letter of the law, they never send to the same address. They just harvest new ones.

Then there is the ‘there is nothing deceptive here!’ comment. If that’s true, why is the from address Kimcarter but the message signed by a Matt somebody, Marketing Director? Of course, just 2 weeks ago ago Matt was their Senior Frontend Developer and used the name Glenn Taylor. Before that it was Glenn Taylor, Jim Whitehead, Andrea Sharp, Ryan Heilman.

The Ryan Heilman message is fun. Apparently, Matt’s scraping software had a bit of a burp and was notifying me of problems with my website williamsnickl.com. Yeah. OK. Ryan, er… Matt, er… spammer. Let’s go with spammer.

It did make me smile today when I noticed this particular group of spammers have had to change their sending domain again. Who is going to tell them that having their actual website in the body of the message means changing the sending domain is useless? (not it!)

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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.

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Want some history?

I was doing some research today for an article I’m working on. The research led me to a San Francisco Law Review article from 2001 written by David E. Sorkin. Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail (.pdf link). The text itself is a little outdated, although not as much as I expected. There’s quite a good discussion of various ways to control spam, most of which are still true and even relevant.

From a historical perspective, the footnotes are the real meat of the document. Professor Sorkin discusses many different cases that together establish the rights of ISPs to filter mail, some of which I wasn’t aware of. He also includes links to then-current news articles about filtering and spam. He also mentions different websites and articles written by colleagues and friends from ‘back in the day’ discussing spam on a more theoretical level.
CNET articles on spam and filtering was heavily referenced by Professor Sorkin. One describes the first Yahoo spam folder. Some things never change, such as Yahoo representatives refusing to discuss how their system works. There were other articles discussing Hotmail deploying the MAPS RBL (now a part of Trend Micro) and then adding additional filters into the mix a few weeks later.
We were all a little naive back then. We thought the volumes of email and spam were out of control. One article investigated the effectiveness of filters at Yahoo and Hotmail, and quoted a user who said the filters were working well.

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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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