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You paid money for that?

I just got a call from someone claiming that I “filled out an online form” asking for more information about “an online education.” When pressed, the nice woman kept changing her story about who she was calling for or how she got my phone number. Eventually she admitted that they have a collection of 50 or more websites and it’s very possible that I didn’t give them my information directly.
She did want to reassure me that I had “no obligation to respond.”
How very thoughtful of her to reassure me that some random person giving her my corporate phone number does not obligate me to anything.
I don’t believe for a second that anyone who knows me signed me up to receive information. But I do appear to have gotten on some new mailing list recently. I’m getting a lot of ‘internship’ and ‘summer work’ offers in snail mail. These advertisements that are clearly targeting a different demographic than the one I belong to.
At least 4 companies (so far) seem to have paid good money for totally fake information about me. Of course, when they’re calling or sending me mail there’s no way I can stop it or fix it. I can’t even tell them their vendor is giving them bad information. I guess I just have to take comfort in the fact that they are wasting their money. I only wish they weren’t wasting my time as well.
This is just one example of why purchasing information, or trusting information filled into websites, is a bad idea. The company selling my information makes their profit and it doesn’t matter that their information is bad. If it really was someone filling in my information, that person is wasting the company’s time.
I’ve worked with marketers long enough to know that they just consider the bad data a cost of doing business. Data integrity just isn’t relevant to making a profit. Send enough email, send enough postcards, ring enough phones and profit appears. Even if their targets aren’t what they were sold.

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Transactional advertising

CitiReceipt_modified_smallOne of the things our bank does that I really like is send ATM receipts directly to the email address associated with the ATM card. No more random pieces of paper I have to track down, it’s all there in my mailbox. This week I noticed that the bank is leveraging the transactional mail to tell me about new services they provide.
I think this is awesome. I get my receipt and I get to learn about bank services I didn’t know about previously.
I don’t remember if the bank made me confirm my address when I signed up for online banking, it was a long time ago. But if they did, then they have a dedicated, confirmed advertising channel right to my mailbox. Good for them, convenient for me.
A win-win.

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Tracking consumers

In an effort to more closely observe the group’s buying habits and personal behaviors, a growing number of corporations are turning to tag and release programs to study American consumers, sources confirmed Friday. The Onion

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Authenticating with SPF: -all or ~all

What is SPF?

Sender policy framework (SPF, RFC 7208) is an authentication process that ties the 5321.from (also known as the mail from, envelope from or return path) to authorized sending IP addresses. This authorization is published in a TXT record in DNS. Receivers can check SPF at the beginning of a SMTP transaction, compare the 5321.from domain to the connecting IP address and determine if that IP is authorized to transmit mail.

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Affiliate mailers struggling

What are affiliate mailers?

Affiliate mailers collect email addresses and then rent access to those addresses out to 3rd parties. There are a wide range of vendors that fall into the affiliate category. Some vendors compile lists through co-registration, others compile lists themselves through website opt-ins and some affiliate vendors fulfill mailing requests by hiring affiliates. There are, of course, some senders in the affiliate space that don’t even pretend to send opt-in mail, they just buy, compile or harvest addresses and blast mail to those addresses.

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Updates to commercial MTAs

Last week Message Systems announced the release of Momentum 4. This high volume MTA has a large number of features that make it possible for large volume senders to manage their email and their delivery. I had the opportunity to get a preview of the new features and was quite impressed with the expanded features. Improvements that caught my eye include:

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Stop telling me how great Spamarrest is

Late last year, Al wrote a piece discussing how Spamarrest lost a court case. In the comments on that piece I described how much I really detest Spamarrest because of all the spam I get from Spamarrest users. Every few weeks, someone notices that post again and points it out to Spamarrest users who then come over here to tell me how wonderful Spamarrest is for them.
I Get It. You like Spamarrest because it keeps spam out of your inbox.
The problem is Spamarrest (and any other challenge response setup) contributes to spam in my inbox. I have addresses that get forged into spam all the time. When that happens, I get dozens of Spamarrest challenges, clogging up MY inbox.
I don’t want to do your spam filtering for you. I really don’t. And if you ask me if you should receive a piece of email, I am going to tell you yes. I did that for a while; when I got a challenge from someone I’d answer it in the affirmative. Eventually I got tired of it and sent all mail from @spamarrest.com to /dev/null.
Am I missing out on corresponding with some brilliant and wonderful people? Maybe. But from my perspective, 100% of the confirmation requests I receive from Spamarrest are spam.  I’m just thankful that Spamarrest makes it easy to identify and throw away their requests so I don’t have to handle someone else’s spam load in addition to my own.
This is a long way to say I’m closing comments on the older Spamarrest post, so don’t bother telling me what a great spam filter it is. The same thing that makes it a great spam filter for you makes it a total source of spam for me.

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A good example of a privacy change notification

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A friendly reader sent me this example of the notice Coldwater Creek sent out to subscribers this week.
Coldwater Creek was a major retailer that recently filed for bankruptcy. As part of that, they’re transferring assets, including customer lists, to a holding company for potential use when the company is re-launched. That holding company is also the parent company of Talbots, another clothing retailer.
The thing I really like about this notice is that it’s clear what the company is doing with customer information. Not only that, the customer gets to control their information and with whom it gets shared.

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Spam filters and mailbox usage

It’s no secret that I run very little in the way of spam filters, and what filters I do run don’t throw away mail, they just shove it into various mailboxes.
Looking at my mailboxes currently I have 11216 unread messages in my mail.app junk folder, 10600 unread messages in my work spam assassin folder and 29401 messages in my personal spam assassin folder (mail getting more than +7 on our version of spam assassin gets filtered into these folders). I went through and marked all of my messages read back in mid-January. That’s a little over 50,000 messages in a little over 5 months or slightly more than 2700 spams a week.
But these are messages I don’t have to deal with so while they’re somewhat annoying and a bit of “wow, my addresses are everywhere” they’re not a huge deal. I have strong enough filters for wanted mail that I can special case it.

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Are FBLs required for a clean mail stream?

A few years ago I would have said that a good mailer could have a good mailing program without necessarily participating in FBL programs. I’m not convinced that’s true any longer. As the mailbox providers and ISPs develop more complex filtering methodologies, it’s important for senders to get any possible feedback from recipients. That press on the this-is-spam button may not actually mean the mail is spam, but it does mean that recipient really didn’t like the message.
Getting the feedback lets a sender fine tune their sending processes and better target what their recipients want to receive.
I do think that senders need to know what users are saying about their email. When users hit the T-i-S button then that is valuable information about how the recipients think about the mail. Senders really on top of things can use positive data (opens and clicks) and negative data (FBLs and unsubscribes) to monitor how wanted their email is and make adjustments to their sending stream.
 
 

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