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
What is a spamtrap?
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
Political spam: A Few Stats
I’m not enamored with political senders. As a group, they tend to have a sense of entitlement to engage in poor practices. So, they buy, sell, rent, and trade lists. Today’s post is a case study in the last presidential election. I gave tagged addresses to the Trump, Warren, Sanders, and Clinton campaigns. In each
So tell us how you REALLY feel
People will sometimes ask me why I hate the Lead Generation (lead gen) and Payday Loan industries. Ultimately, it’s because they have such deep problems that I don’t think that any self-respecting ESP should take them on as a client. This morning, I saw a [acp author=”United States Federal Trade Commission” id=”FTC-01″ title=”Data Broker Defendants Settle FTC
What happened to Compu-Finder?
The CTRC said today that it has issued its first penalty against someone for sending emails violating Canada’s anti-spam law. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, CRTC Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer Issues $1.1 Million Penalty to Compu-Finder for Spamming Canadians, Government of Canada (2015), https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2015/03/crtc-chief-compliance-enforcement-officer-issues-1-1-million-penalty-compu-finder-spamming-canadians.html (last visited Jun 2, 2024). The penalty is substantial (C$1.1
Don’t opt-out of spam?
Yesterday, Laura Atkins wrote a blog post which suggests that unsubscribing from spam doesn’t result in receiving more spam (Atkins 2013). I know that this is a project that she’s been working on for at least a month, and I don’t have any reason to doubt her results. Additionally, she links to (Magill 2013), (Pogue 2013),
Looking at a spam stream: The story of Jimmy Walker
I was recently asked about how to go about proving that someone was not obtaining email addresses in a direct, opt-in manner. The methodology won’t surprise you, and if you have been involved in helping problematic clients for a while, the results might not even surprise you. The “someone” at issue was a payday loaner.