What does your relationship look like?
Delivering mail successfully is a full-time job for a lot of people. My full-time job is handling complaints about the mail. What do those complaints look like? Well, they fall into a few different buckets: Please unsubscribe me.This is spam.“I’ve asked to be removed from your customer’s list and they just refuse.”“Your mail server is…
Policy at scale: Policy is relative
Telling stories is a dangerous thing in my line of work. But, work cannot get done without telling stories. On the one hand, you want the story to be accurate, but several really legitimate considerations mean that you can’t be so precise as to allow others to determine who is being referred to. If you…
What is opt-in?
Like all other reputable email service providers, my employer has an opt-in based anti-spam policy. This sometimes brings up a question about what qualifies as permissible consent under our policy. While we definitely believe that our policy is clear enough, a few weeks ago, I decided to break down some ideas about permission, consent, and…
I’m still here…
An apology: I haven’t forgotten about the blog, and really haven’t neglected things so much as I’ve been super busy. Since my last post, I have: Overseen the transition of our team’s ticketing queue from one platform to another.Applied to the University of Houston Law Center’s part-time/evening program. (The next time that you are lacking…
Policy at scale: What makes an actionable complaint?
Here’s something that you may not know about abuse desks: they’re busy. The further up the “food chain” that you get, the smaller the relative number of complaints that you’ll see, but almost any abuse desk is going to be dealing in at least several thousands of complaints per year. Dealing with complaints, then, is…
Policy at scale: Figuring reputational damage
How important is policy? Policy not only reflects and is a product of reality. Policies are created as a reflection of what a company wants to do and how it will pursue its business. For some companies, that means “we will try to get away with doing no more than the law requires.” For others,…
Policy Practicum: COVID-19
How does general policy change in the face of a known health emergency? It’s a really tough question that can be fraught with pitfalls and emotions. So, this will be the very first of an intermittent series of posts covering the policy implications of things happening in real life. First, a disclaimer I feel the…
Policy at scale: It both is and is not about the customer
There’s an old quote sometimes (mis)attributed to Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic” (Wikiquote contributors 2020). The same thing holds true when it comes to policy enforcement: A single customer can be watched carefully but hundreds or thousands of customers fall to statistics. Mass detection…
Policy at scale: The purpose of a policy is protection
The purpose of a written policy is to protect the provider by protecting the customer. Stated policies — especially in written form — provide a baseline of expected behavior that other people on the Internet can look toward. So, customers, prospects, recipients, and other providers are able to see what standards apply to the use…
Policy at scale: Understanding the issue
One of the more difficult things to consider is how policies scale when you are talking about sending millions or billions of messages per day. But, being able to scale your policies to go along with your business is an important consideration. I generally operate with a rule of thumb that any direct complaint (where…