What does your relationship look like?
15 November 2021
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…
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…
Political spam: A Few Stats
10 January 2018
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
22 February 2016
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?
5 March 2015
The [acp author=”Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission” title=”CRTC Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer issues $1.1 million penalty to Compu-Finder for spamming Canadians” id=”CRTC-01″ media=”website” url=”http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?mthd=tp&crtr.page=1&nid=944159&crtr.tp1D=1″ year=”2015″ month=”March” day=”5″ year_access=”2015″ month_access=”March” day_access=”5″ ]{author} announced[/acp] today that they have issued their first penalty against someone for sending email in violation of Canada’s anti-spam law. The penalty is substantial…
Don’t opt-out of spam?
19 November 2013
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),…
Wherein Zoominfo causes spam
18 November 2013
Zoominfo, DiscoverOrg, and Lead411 are popular lead generation sources. Every once in a while someone comes along and tries to defend the use of crowd sourced list generation services (of which ZoomInfo and Jigsaw seem to be the largest). These systems work by allowing people to download contact information for third parties in exchange for the…
Looking at a spam stream: The story of Jimmy Walker
8 November 2013
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.…
Can I Help You?
21 April 2010
I just finished an Emergency Medical Responder course. I’m not a paramedic, I’m not even an EMT, but I am now qualified to stop and give people help until those folks show up. As I reflect on the course, I see some parallels to email marketing. Over the next few days, I’ll be talking about…