Abuse Desks HATE Political Emailers: How You Can Stand Out
1 May 2024
Political email marketing can be a powerful tool for reaching and engaging constituents. However, behind the scenes, it’s a landscape fraught with frustration for abuse desks. Here’s why: Lack of Opt-In and List Sharing Political emailers often obtain email addresses through various means, including purchasing and trading lists or scraping them from public sources (such
Just some unsolicited advice
21 February 2024
We’re just now getting into the year and Mother’s Day will be here before you know it. Father’s Day will follow not far behind. A couple of years ago, someone came up with the idea of asking people if they wanted to get emails related to those holidays, and the idea has really caught on
Interview with Al Iverson
13 February 2024
My good friend Al Iverson did a short interview with me over on his Spam Resource blog.
Policy at scale: Figuring reputational damage
19 March 2020
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 exists for business reasons
2 March 2020
We live in a politically polarized world. Everyone wants exactly what they want and will only take it exactly as they would like it. You only need to look at the 2020 US Elections to see that. The New York Times has a wonderful example of that from the left: The movement’s identity is based
How to handle spamtraps
27 February 2020
So, you’ve discovered that your customer has an issue with spamtraps on a mailing list. What do you do now? As a rule, spamtraps end up on a list due to problems with permission or hygiene. No, that’s not exclusive of other things, nor is it necessarily an indication that policies have been violated. But,
Spamtraps are not the problem
24 February 2020
When you go to the doctor, do you want the doctor to treat your symptoms or do you want the doctor to give you treatment for the disease that is causing the symptoms? If you’re like most people, the answer will be “I want the doctor to treat the disease.” In my line of work,
What is a spamtrap?
10 February 2020
One of the issues that I get to deal with in policy enforcement is handling complaints about customers sending messages to “spamtraps.” This invariably leads to a discussion about what, exactly, is a spamtrap? There are a lot of different answers out there. For instance, a 2019 blog post at Validity asserts that it is
Mental Health on Teams
6 February 2020
Did you know that “burnout” is coming to the ICD-11 (due to be released in June 2022)? It’s true. Burnout will be recognized as an occupational syndrome resulting from work-related stress. Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: feelings
Enforcement is therapeutic
3 February 2020
Policies exist for a reason. For instance, most email service providers have a policy forbidding the use of non-opt-in lists. Those policies exist because of statements like this one: Microsoft prohibits the use of the service in any manner associated with the transmission, distribution, or delivery of any unsolicited bulk or unsolicited commercial e-mail (“spam”). You