I recently heard from some friends about Penton Media sending an email asking people to subscribe to get third-party emails. They didn’t like being required to opt out to avoid receiving emails that weren’t requested in the first place, even if a warning had been given that the emails were coming.
Apparently, Spamhaus agreed with those folks, as SBL115700 appeared on August 15. (Currently, it says that this is the “2nd listing in less than 30 days for spam from this IP”.)
There are, of course, a lot of things to say about this course of action, but one that stands out above the others. And I found the evidence this morning in my own mail reader.
I got the email, too. Now, guess where it arrived. That’s right, it showed up in my spam folder, where it has sat for the last three days, unopened and unread.
Unlike many people, I go through my spam folder to see what gets caught. I just happened to see this in the midst of all of the counterfeit bag/(fake) Cialis/work at home scam/(bad) porn spam. And the penalty for not checking my spam folder would have been receiving more emails. And I could only hope at this point that Gmail would have tagged it all as spam and dealt with it so that I wouldn’t have had to.
The issue is that if I had complained about one of those emails, Penton would have told me that I had opted in to receive the mail because I hadn’t opted out. But, you see, I didn’t opt in; I just never saw an opportunity to stop the mail preemptively. And I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one that this would have happened to.
That’s why a well-run opt-in campaign will require the user to take action to receive the email. That action can take place in several places, ranging from “at the website where they are signing up” to “click here to receive these valuable offers that we’re just now getting ready to send you.”
Email is certainly one of those places where you cannot assume that silence is consent.
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
