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Unsubscribes made difficult

Dennis blogs about his experience trying to unsubscribe from classmates.com list over on deliverability.com. His experience touches on a number of points I have discussed recently.
Dennis initially signed up for a free account at classmates.com around 10 years ago, but has asked to be unsubscribed multiple times. Recently classmates reactivated his subscription again, sending him marketing mail he did not want. Reactivating subscriptions is an extremely bad idea. Not only is it a CAN-SPAM violation to send mail after an unsubscribe has been received, but senders really end up annoying recipients by doing this. Think about it, these are people who have actively told the sender that they do not want mail, and the sender goes out and decides to override the recipients wishes.
I can only imagine how horrible the delivery for this mailing was. ISPs measure how many non-existent addresses senders attempt and mailing a list that has addresses accreted over 10 years is going to have a massive number of dead addresses. Not that many people have the same address now that they did 10 years ago. Some of those dead addresses are probably now being used as spamtraps by the ISPs, another hit to delivery rates. Finally, there are the complaint rates to consider.
For those people who received the mail and want to unsubscribe, Classmates.com does everything possible to discourage that. Dennis describes the process he went through.

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Marketers missing out

Many delivery blogs have posted about the recent ReturnPath study showing that marketers are missing prime opportunities to use email to develop a strong relationship with recipients. I finally manged to get a few moments to read through the study and comment on it. Over a few days in February ReturnPath researchers signed up at more than 60 major retailer brands. They then monitored the subscriptions to see how often and what kind of mail the retailers sent.
Overall, it seems the researchers were disappointed in how the retailers were using mail. Even the title of the whitepaper captures this feeling: “Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Are Marketers Relationship Worthy?” The answer seems to be more no than yes.
From my perspective the data is not all that surprising. In many cases it seems bigger companies rely on the recognition of their brand to get them through minor delivery problems (like complaints) rather than good practices. Whereas a smaller company will have to work harder to develop a relationship, larger companies with wide brand recognition can fall back on their brand.
There were a few areas ReturnPath measured.

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Broadcom Exec drugs employees

And I laughed at the people who said that some technology executives were on drugs. Over at Broadcom it looks like some of them were, but only because their CEO spiked their drinks.

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Before you send email

Seth Godin lists the 38 things you should do before you send an email. 

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Microsoft takes on phishers

Microsoft has a post up talking about phishers and how to protect yourself. 

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Suppression lists

Mickey has a post up about how long senders must hold on to that suppression list. 

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EEC Followup

I was just forwarded email from the DMA about the EEC issue. To their credit, the DMA took the problem seriously. The email says: 

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E360 drops suit against antispammers

E360 has asked for their suit against 3 anti-spammers to be dropped with prejudice. Docs at Spamsuite, commentary at The Spam Diaries.

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ISP Spam

One thing I do not talk about very often is the amount of spam that comes out of ISP smarthosts. Generally this is because many of the major end user ISPs do a reasonable job managing their spam and the ratio of spam to not-spam mail coming out of their IPs is heavily weighted towards the not-spam end of things.
This has not always been the case, and there have been instances where ISPs particularly those providing webmail have been exploited by spammers, often Nigerians, and used to send tons of spam. It can take months to fix, and requires the ISP employees to actively seek and destroy problem accounts, block access from some IP ranges and change their security to prevent future compromises.
We know that spammers exploit webmail services and that there are things that the webmail services need to do. Recently, there seems to have been a massive uptick in the amount of spam coming through Gmail’s servers.
This is not a problem unique to Gmail, most of the other webmail companies have had similar infestations of 419 spammers in the past. The Nigerians figure out how to exploit some part of the webmail infrastructure, create tens of thousands of accounts and send spam through those accounts. Once the ISP fixes the problem, the Nigerians move on to the next webmail provider to abuse. Meanwhile, receivers can block some or most of the Nigerian spam by blocking on the X-Originating-IP. Much of the spam is blocked, but non-spam email from the ISP gets through.
In the Gmail case blocking is not so simple. As a matter of policy, Gmail does not put an originating IP address in email sent through the Gmail interface. Not having originating IPs puts receivers in the position of only having the option of blocking Gmail’s IPs, not the abusers who are using Gmail. This has been an unpopular policy decision by Gmail, and they have been approached by numerous groups to convince them to provide this level of information so receivers can make more selective blocking decisions.
It remains to be seen how quickly Gmail gets their outbound 419 spam under control. The rumblings I am hearing from people about the problem are getting louder. The supporting data quietly being handed around are astonishing and point to a genuine problem at Gmail. Hopefully, Gmail will take action now and stop spammers from abusing their system before the extent of their problem becomes more public.

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ReturnPath Joe Job

ReturnPath has posted information about the Joe Job against them. 

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