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Check your unsubscribe process

When was the last time you actually tried to unsubscribe from one of your mailing lists? Have you ever even checked to see that your process works?
For whatever reason, unsubscribe processes don’t always work. Sometimes the problem is on the client end. Sometimes the problem is on the ESP end. But in either case, continuing to mail recipients who have attempted to opt-out from your mail is a recipe for disaster.
I mentioned last week about our new mortgage company that can’t process my unsubscribe. Today I contacted their ESP and pointed out I’d tried to unsub a few times, but was still getting mail. The ESP thanked me, pointed out that was not an ESP managed unsubscribe page and did a little digging. A few hours later their delivery guy told me that he saw my multiple unsubscribe attempts (June, July, 2 in August…) and they were all marked as “trashed.”  But he’s going to make sure I’m not mailed any more and follow up with his customer.
Now, there are a lot of reasons this unsub process could have failed. It could be that the website doesn’t handle my tagged addresses well and this is a bank, it’s very possible security is locked down. But that means they shouldn’t have accepted my tagged address in the first place.
There are a couple things to take away from this story.

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Thanks for your questions!

Thanks, everyone, who submitted questions to laura-questions@wordtothewise.com. We’ve gotten some great questions to answer here on the blog. I’m working through the emails and contacting folks if I have questions. I’ll be answering the first question on Wednesday.
I also did have someone harvest the address off the website and send me non-CAN SPAM compliant spam to it. I have to admit, I didn’t expect someone to harvest the address at all, but especially not within 12 hours of posting an address. Particularly someone who’s not harvested our contact address previously. I also am considering how much content I could get detailing taking the spammer to court in CA for violating CAN SPAM and the CA anti-spam statute.
 

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RFC-i blocklist shutting down

The RFC-ignorant blocklist announced on 9/15 that it will be shutting down service.
I commend Derek and his team for how they’re handling the shut down. All too many blocklists have been shut down due to owner burnout with disastrous consequences. Most of these lists did things like listing the whole world or just pulling domains out of the roots. Both types of shutdown methods cause problems for unrelated entities. In one case, a major DNS provider was dealing with what looked like a DOS attack after one blocklist shut down.
I’ve certainly had my differences of opinion with the folks behind RFC-i over the years, but I commend them for announcing the shut down ahead of time and gracefully shutting down RFC-i.
 

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Ask Word to the Wise

One of the challenges of writing a blog for 5 years is making sure we’re providing information our readers really want. I figure the easiest way to do that is to have you ask us questions about the things you want to know.
You can ask questions in the comments here, send them to laura-questions@wordtothewise.com or tweet them to me @wise_laura.
 

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Let them go!

Unsubscribing should be so simple. Even if someone signed up for mail, senders should let them go when they unsubscribe. Unfortunately, there are a lot of senders that make it difficult to unsubscribe. In fact, many companies are still hiding unsubscribe links behind login pages.

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Open Relays and Mail Sinks

Email is a “store and forward” protocol. The sender doesn’t connect directly to the recipient to send the mail with just one network hop, rather the sender connects to a mailserver (usually referred to as an “MTA”, short for Mail Transfer Agent) and sends the message there. Once that MTA has received the message it sends it on to another MTA, and so on until it reaches the recipient.
Mail clients typically don’t have any intelligence built in to them to decide which MTA to send an email to. Instead they’re configured to blindly send every message to one particular local MTA, the smarthost, which then does all the proper SMTP work to decide where to send it on to.

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Questions about CAN SPAM.

In the US, the law governing the sending of commercial email is CAN SPAM. I’ve seen a number of questions about CAN SPAM recently.
One came from twitter, where someone was asking if just having an email address meant permission to send to it. Clearly, just being able to dig up an email address doesn’t imply permission to send marketing or commercial email to it. I can promise you April23@contact.wordtothewise.com did not sign up to receive information on increasing Facebook followers.
CAN SPAM doesn’t prohibit unsolicited email. All it says is that if you send unsolicited email you must do a few things.

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Just Block It

I tend to go back and forth about reporting spam these days. On one level I know that it’s all a numbers game, and policy enforcement is more about the quantity of complaints than the quality. Knowing this I don’t often send in complaints. I do make a few exceptions: when I know the policy enforcement team or when it’s a current or former client.

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Equivocating about spamtraps

What is a spamtrap? According to a post I saw on Twitter:

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Dr. Livingston, I presume?

I linked to Al’s post about misdirected emails and how annoying it is for people who receive emails. I’ve previously talked about the problems associated with not handling misdirected emails properly.
It’s really annoying getting email that you never signed up for. For instance, one of my email addresses gets quite a bit of misdirected email. Oddly enough, much of this mail comes addressed to “Mrs. Christine Stelfox” and advertises various services. The problem is, I’m not Mrs. Christine Stelfox and I don’t live in the UK.
I’ve been getting this misdirected email for a while. In fact, I’ve even tried to track down the source of this just to make it stop. But I can’t seem to get that to happen. The senders tell me simply that I opted in, and that if I want to opt-out, here’s a link. Sometimes I have more luck contacting ESPs, but not always.
In fact, recently I reported spam to Mrs. Stelfox to a European based ESP. I got a response from their delivery head, who asked a lot of questions about the email address. What kind of spamtrap was it? How long had I had it? Is it possible it’s a recycled address? It’s really not, though. It’s an address I’ve had since early 1994, and it’s not really a trap as I still actually use if for some me. But I’ve not used it for commercial email since sometime in the late ’90s. And I’ve certainly never claimed to be a Mrs. Stelfox.
This really isn’t a case where I forgot I signed up. This isn’t a case where someone had the address before me. This is either some confused person using my address or some company in the UK selling my email address as belonging to someone else. I’ve tried to track this down in the past to get off the list of whomever is selling this address. But I’ve never had any luck.
There isn’t a lot of recourse here. I can continue to unsubscribe the addresses, but that doesn’t resolve the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that many marketers think it’s acceptable to purchase (or append) email addresses with no regard for the fact that sometimes their data suppliers are wrong.
It’s not just this one address, either. Another one of my email addresses is being sold as “Mrs. Laura Corbishley” of the UK as well. Sometimes I get the same spam to Mrs. Christine Stelfox and Mrs. Laura Corbishley. Other times I get different spams to each address, possibly because Mrs. Stelfox is behind some commercial email filters and Mrs. Corbishley isn’t.
Misdirected emails are annoying. They’re a problem for the people who keep getting them and can’t make them stop. It’s really important that ESPs, companies that send email and companies that sell email addresses have some way to make that mail stop. It doesn’t matter that half a dozen ESPs have put Mrs. Stelfox in their suppression list. Senders are still purchasing that data and are wasting their money. I am still getting spam.
 
 
 

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