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7 Ways to Be Mistaken for a Spammer
ancientribe writes "The "This is Spam" button popping up on many service providers' email services can be empowering for a user, but it can also be the kiss of death for a legitimate business that gets canned with a click of that button. Dark Reading has a story on seven common missteps that can lead to a case of mistaken spammmer identity for a legit business trying to send its marketing email, newsletters or other correspondence."
What I hate is that there is little room left on the internet for legitimate advertising. When the first spam messages went out back in the 90s, they didn't try to be as deceptive or fraudulent as they are today. People still hated them, but at least they were being more honest about their practices. Nowadays you have real spammers that are disruptive, invasive, fraudulent and don't care that they are these things. This is the real spam. However there are still a lot of people out there that think that every piece of marketing material whether its legitimate or not should be treated as spam and the person sending it should be hung out on a noose.
If people are going to have this opinion in a capatalistic society, then that's hypocrisy and I think they need to think a bit more about what they are doing. If these people think that advertising shouldn't have a place in our society then I think they should consider that maybe money doesn't either. Because we can't have both. Capitalism needs marketing,
When I put advertisements in my signature line, I try not to be invasive, fraudulent or deceptive. But yet people treat me like I'm hell incarnate. I think that's wrong.
sending email to people who tell you not to do it anymore makes you a spammer
Selling email addresses to other business, makes you a spammer.
Ingoring user email preferences makes you a spammer
Losing track of systems shows you are a fool
A two-fer both a spammer and a fool!
Poor coding shows you are a fool, in particular as this is an old old trick
"lie down with dogs wake up with fleas"
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
> marketing email, newsletters or other correspondence.
Legitimate equals explicit opt-in.
I know its bad to be called a spammer, but I can't even being to imagine what it's like to have something thing you're a spammmer.
I admit it, I to have purposefully signed up for commercial emails that I later got tired of receiving. Instead of unsubscribing which was difficult I simply hit the Spam button on gmail. Maybe marketters need to make unsubscribing a bit easier and they might not get caught up in service wide filters.
I once did an online order from Pizza Hut, and I've been stuck on their mailing list ever since. I did their unsubscribe spiel, and was aghast: they said it would take 6-8 weeks for me to get off their mailing list.
In this day and age of computers, 6-8 weeks to be removed off of their mailings is ridiculous. I'm not trying to buy a house here, I just don't want your correspondence.
Legit marketing emails? Just go RSS or make a web page. Let them come to you.
1) Don't send email in HTML format. 2) Don't send email as .doc attachments that need to be opened by third party applications to be viewed.
3) Plain text is usually sufficient.
Whether it is my physical or electronic mailbox, anything that more or less looks like advertisement goes to the bin without a second thought. The good thing with the email is that, most of the time, I don't even notice I got something in the first place.
Like it or not, many people think they alrteady received enouth ads for the rest of their life and see them as an agression, no matter if they come from a legitimate business, and sometimes, even from business they are already buying from.
The only legitimate point is users using the "This is spam" button to unsubscribe to newletters they legitimately subscribed to. This isn't fair to an honest company. However, there are risks to advertising through newsletters, and this is one. As long as companies are informed of the risk, and can take steps to mitigate it, then its all fair, I suppose.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
All the mail i receive from companies that i have not requested, is from my point of view Spam, and therefore gets reported as spam. I fail to see why many companies still believe that they have some right to mail me their commercials.. if I'm interested, i find their webpage. / Mark
i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!
It's not just e0mail addresses, it's all customer information.
I once attended a seminar on buying businesses. One of the methods of getting capital is to sell the customer list of the business you acquire. It doesn't matter what the original owners promised their customers, you own it now and there's nothing they can do about it.
That's something to remember, even the current owners promise that they won't pimp you data, it doesn't prevent future owners from doing so. ANd even then, management changes or business starts take a downturn, it's amazing how "privacy policies" that "are subject to change at anytime" do so.
And to be honest, if my back was against the wall, I'd probably do the same. Especially if it's choice between going bankrupt or staying solvent.
Marketing has one goal: to make you think different about something.
No thanks, I determine my how and based-on-what I will think about things.
AOL users report everything as spam, they think it is the same as pressing delete. AOL forward a copy of all reported spam back to the ISP's abuse address. I gets emails from users mothers, friends, etc forwarded to me, most of which are not spam.
>> a legit business trying to send its marketing email, newsletters or other correspondence
I'm sorry, but this is de facto spam. Any "legit business" trying to send me anything "marketing" can fuck right off.
to be identified as a spammer:
If I didn't ask to receive your email, you're a spammer.
Period.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Capitalism does not need marketing,
Without marketing, will I starve to death? No, of course not. I will seek to buy food.
Will I not have a car? No, of course not. I will seek a place to buy one.
I might not buy a pet rock, chia pet, or similar. Oh well. That's a gain for me.
We could really use more stuff like Consumer Reports, but funding is difficult.
A good start though: strict truth-in-advertising laws. Today it is considered "free speech" for a company to lie about their products, subject to very few limitations. If the soap gets whites whiter, there ought to be published research indicating so. If a product is "the best", it ought to be truly the best from the consumer's viewpoint in at least one normal and legitimate way.
It also helps when you consider the layout of your eMail carefully. It has happened several times now that users come complaining that our mailserver tags their mail as spam. When investigating the eMail it is virtual in distinguishable from real spam. Some users even think that spam-layout and tricks to fool rulebased anti-spam programs is a "standard" for advertising, and things like obfuscating words are "Cool". (Really, I'm not joking)
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!
I recently tried to contact Rockwell Collins about manufacturing a part, however I ran into their spam blocker. Apparently, anyone who does not own their own netblock gets marked as a spammer. This means that small businesses, like mine, have problems contacting companies like this.
I managed to get around the issue by routing my email through my ISP's email server (which is static), although it was very annoying to have to do that.
I received an email from the company that blocked my email stating that I was probably spam and that I was not allowed in to their email system. I have a registered company, so I did not take this very well. Very easily the technicians at the spam-blocking business could have gone to netcraft and looked up my DNS information to verify that I was who I said I was. Still, it was very insulting to receive a message that essentially states "You are probably a spammer, so we're not going to relay your email."
Spam has become so pervasive that some companies are completely paranoid about that. As for Rockwell Collins, I can understand them not wanting to get a visus that compromised a sensitive project on their network. But this brings up the crux of the problem: should companies assume that any IP in a dynamic range is a spammer email?
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#1. Since you're sending out HTML email anyway, why not put the unsubscribe button at the top of the message? If you're going to be funny and make it an "unsubscribe from this particular spam run" then you need to add a second button, again at the top of the message, that will unsubscribe the recipient from ALL of your mailings. ALL of them. Not most of them. Not some of them. Not everything except the ones the marketing department really wants to get out. ALL OF THEM.
... but that your subscription will end on (insert date) of this year UNLESS you click on the "continue my subscription for another year" button at the top of the message or copy this URL to your browser.
#2. If that's too much work for you, try an automatic opt-out program. Send a message once a month saying that you're still subscribed
I am not going to waste MY time trying to find where you've hidden the unsubscribe option.
Spammers often do not have an unsubscribe button/link (those that do usually collect the addresses). If I cannot INSTANTLY find the unsubscribe button then I'm going to treat you like a spammer.
Oh, and one other item - USE YOUR OWN FUCKING DOMAIN.
If I look at the headers and I see that you claim to be a@b.com but the sending server's IP is tied to c.com then I'm going to blacklist c.com as a spammer.
Okay, one last item, if I put the sending server's IP address into a browser and get a generic "unsubscribe" page, yeah, you're a spammer.
If I put c.com (from the above example) into a browser and you don't have a webpage, yeah, you're a spammer.
I am on a mailing list for a local (okay, regional) club that has about 150-200 members. You have to opt-in to get on the list. Well, seems that one or two members didn't (or couldn't figure out how to) unsubscribe when they didn't want to read the list - they just hit the AOL "this is spam" button. That would be fine, except that AOL started blocking the listserve machine completely, and nobony who used AOL get their list emails. It took a while to petition AOL to get white listed, then some idiot got us re-blacklisted.
To get around it, the list admin ended up reworking the list so that each recipient got thier own, personally addressed email. Not to stop the spam-blocking, but to find the "problem" user. A lot of work to get the list back up and running for those on AOL.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
8. Getting caught up by overzealous antispam blocklists
I get bounces all the time because ISP's use overzealous blocklists who care little about
collateral damage. Most recently, we've had mail blocked from godaddy.com users (through their
"secureservers.net" blocklist). The funny thing is, the IP listed in the bounce message
isn't even the one we forward our mail to, but rather another server the mail gets forwarded through,
meaning there's a good chance that this single IP listing is blocking tens of thousands of
customer emails (our ISP is sbc.com). Nice job godaddy!
No, dude. There is no objective definition of spam. If Fred calls something spam, then for Fred, it's spam. It doesn't matter if the sender was a legitimate business, or even if he signed up for the newsletter in the first place. If he doesn't want it anymore, then he can go ahead and click the "this is spam" button in his e-mail client, and it will be right.
If that's true, then how did Google grow into a $150 billion company in just 8 years?
Then you should drop the "Mention Slashdot and 2 free months of service." It makes you sound like a damn used car salesman.
1. Ignoring "unsubscribe" requests.
2. List "repurposing."
3. Providing unclear privacy checkbox instructions, and ignoring users' responses.
If the "legitimate" emailer is doing any of these, that's not "being mistaken for a spammer". That's good old fashioned spam, pure and simple.
1) and potentially 3) are violations of the CAN SPAM Act and will land the "legitimate" marketer in legal trouble (well, they would, if someone was actually enforcing the CAN SPAM Act).
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I though this would be a list of technical reasons to get misbranded as spam, I think lots of small companies that send out (requested) mailings make these mistakes (or have them made by their providers) in all earnesty:
1. Incorrect reverse DNS. 1.1.1.1 == mydomain.com but mydomain.com != 1.1.1.1 Spam filters really hate this, even if it reverses to the same class C network
2. Mailserver on another IP address. www.mydomain.com == 1.1.1.1 but mail.mydomain.com != 1.1.1.1
Just my recent experiences, hope it helps someone.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
There is no such thing as "legitimate marketing". All commercial e-mail is Spam - hardly anyone actually *wants* it, and even people who do want some of the information provided in a marketing e-mail are invariably fed needless heaps of marketing spiel as well.
Yes, there are ethical guidelines that have been established, and there are people that follow them. However, if you look carefully, these so-called ethical guidelines are mainly geared to protect the PR industry (or in this case, the direct marketing industry) from the public, by preventing their members from arousing ire. This is like saying, "I'm not a murderer - I strictly adhere to the ethical standards and guidlines of the American Association of Professional Dismemberers and Disembowlers, and never splatter gore on your lawn."
I'll restrict myself to marketing which follows the general professional guidelines in the US, which basically has two effects:
a) Deception. No, not "lying" (which is unethical,) but misdirection and FUD.
b) Market distortion. In order for us to realize all of the benefits which capitalism is theoretically supposed to provide, we need informed consumers making rational choices in an open commodity field with low cost of entry. The requirement to build brand-name recognition through advertizing (which is distinct from building a reputation for quality simply by selling a good product) drives up the cost of entry, discourages informed decision making, and otherwise stifles competition.
People who actually violate the law cause all kinds of additional damage to the economy, but that's chump change compared to the damage that legitimate businesses do.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
If I didn't ask you to send me email, then it's spam. And brother - I didn't as you.
...
I use gmail primarily because it allowed me to make use of me email again, after years of spam abuse. I also liberally use the "this is spam" button, and most of it is of the dubious type. Occasionally, I'll get mail from companies that I have used (I always opt-out if I have the option). The first time, i'll follow the unsubscribe procedure. The second time, you're tagged as spam, and you deserve it.
If you run a business - any kind of business - and you want to send information to existing or potential customers, here's my list of do's and don'ts
1. don't send me email unless I ask for it by explicitly opting in.
it's really that simple. If i'm a potential customer and you send me unsolicited email, you've just lost my potential custom.
There are a number of very tempermental people out there who will label email that annoys them as spam, even though it isn't. They may have even signed up for a mailing list, but are not the type to be bothered with even trying to get off of that. Same people probably also find disagreement with them to be a sign of sheer stupidity, but that's beside the point. That's what bothers me about some of the user-controlled spam reporting. Most users don't know enough to handle this, and it can be bad for a business, website, blog, etc. that gets marked as spam by some asshole who cannot be bothered to simply delete a message.
if you send this topic to 5 friends you won't be a spammer today.
if you send this topic to 10 friends you won't be a spammer in a month.
if you send this topic to all your contacts you won't be a spammer anymore.
This is especially frustrating to me, as it just so happens I am actually an exiled Nigerian prince who makes a perfectly honest living selling male potency supplements. Badly designed spam-blocking systems have made it incredibly difficult for me to find a complete stranger who will let me deposit sixty millions of American dollars into their bank account for completely legitimate reasons.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
They cannot even monitor their email logs for rejected messages ... so they can remove those addresses from their list ... yet they're supposedly savvy enough to maintain a database of usernames and passwords tied to email addresses? For years? Accurately?
No, this is just about making it more difficult for you to "opt-out".
Listen up "email marketing companies", you want to make it slightly easier for me to unsubscribe than it is to auto-forward you messages to a blacklist. I'm going to take the easiest route, the same as you did.
I have posted links to blog entries on other bloggers' sites during a disagreement because my post had a lot of information that countered their point, including links to some original sources (in some cases, the original source had died and my post was the last copy of that information). Not talking about spamming here, but discretely linking to a post that was relevant and contained information like facts and figures that were relevant to the points I was making. Soon after losing the argument, the other guy made it so that any link I tried to present to back up what I was saying, got flagged as spam. Then, same thing happened with some of the other sites I linked to such as BibleGateway when he'd get into a theological fight with me. I ended up having to actually drop in several kb of text to back up what I was saying because he made it so I couldn't post a link to the original source.
He didn't leave it out. It may surprise you, but these 7 points were actually in the article. It surprised me, because I thought the article would mention things like "The subject line of your e-mail just says Hello Mr/Mrs X". But no, the article mentions these 7 points that indeed are highly indicative of a spammer. The title was clearly wrongly chosen. But your 8th point could certainly be added...
If people are going to have this opinion in a capatalistic society, then that's hypocrisy and I think they need to think a bit more about what they are doing. If these people think that advertising shouldn't have a place in our society then I think they should consider that maybe money doesn't either. Because we can't have both. Capitalism needs marketing,
What sort of nonsense is this? If you accept the concept of a free market, then you must accept the fact that there is a market for businesses that do not perform an action that irritates a segment of the market. Capitalism in fact demands that businesses must consider and respond to whether or not customers appreciate marketing. If you fail to meet this demand, then do not have the hypocrisy to whine about consumers having choices.
Capitalism does not mean that society must roll over and accept anything that a business does.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm currently working in advertising, and increasingly we're finding that, no capitalism doesn't need advertising or marketing in this sense. There are a lot of very relevant ways to attract people to products that are not intrusive and can be interesting. Somebody stated that, perfectly targeted advertising is no longer advertising, but information.
Once this hits the mobile, the distinction will be important.
Also, sending emails every other day is a damn good way to be listed as spam!
... actually getting rid of spam...
I know, I know, it's a beaten-to-death subject, but there are many valid commercial offers to many interested parties. Spam made all this marketing mess.
We need to purify email, by means of a new protocol (another beaten-to-deatch subject)...
Have you already checked EmailXT (http://www.emailxt.com/)? It's a protocol that promotes a simple transition path from the current email system, removes unsolicited bulk email (spam/viruses ) from existence, and adds new features like, for instance, easy removal from mailing lists.
However it still has a long path to go (alpha stage, buggy prototype), but it's real and it's promising. My opinion, of course...
The fact is that 99.9%+ of the messages that come from dynamic ranges ARE spam from zombies. That's 999 spam messages to 1 legit message.
Now, remember that someone has to dig through the spam that is delivered to his/her mailbox to find the legit messages. The possibility of missing important messages goes UP as more spam is delivered.
And in that scenario, the sender would NEVER KNOW that there was a problem because his message was accepted and delivered
So, the best solution is to reject all messages from dynamic addresses
Most marketing and sales departments approach emailing as just another way to send out advertising like junk mail through postal system or catalogues being mailed. Except it costs very little to send millions of mail. What they dont realize is that for the customers too have very little cost to respond to unsolicited messages. A car dealer can be obnoxious on radio or tv and people cant do much about it and if they p*ss off thousand listeners and get remembered by say two of them, the advertiser gains. In the net, if you p*ss off thousand, some 10 will respond negatively. Will report you as a spammer, create blockers to block you etc. Even if you gain two new customers, you have lost 10 old customers. Only when the marketing dept realizes this they will implement sane email policy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
>> lead to a case of mistaken spammmer identity for a legit business trying to send its marketing email,
If its unsolicted advertising its spam. It doesn't matter if the company thinks itself is legitimate or not.
spam is not required to be all about p3n1s enlargement.
I actually get one advertising email a week that I look forward to. It's from surplus computers. Their sender is annoying; it changes the send from address to defeat the spam filters, which of course, gmail then thinks it's spam and blocks it. However, it's legitimate email that I opted into and still can't get routinely.
And no, I don't use RRS, don't care to use it, I just want a simple weekly email.
There's a major one missing:
If you have a customer that cancels their account with you, take that as being an opt-out! If they cancel and then a month or so later receive an email from you, they will more likely than not just mark it as spam (with the other couple messages that got through their filters) rather than bother with opening your large, image-filled email just to click a link to go to your slow website to politely stop receiving your email.
I consider all marketing to be spam, i should point out that i have nothing against advertising (here is our product, this is what it does). But marketing (oh my god look how cool this is and how cool you will be if you buy it) sickens me to my stomach, the entire industry is built on deception and has no redeeming features at all.
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
At least, not to me or anyone else I know. Nobody wants advertisements sent to their residence unrequested. Now the LAW might say these unsolicited advertisements are ok...but we all know that the law != justice.
I don't like junk mail in my mailbox that I have to sort and recycle.
I don't like junk mail in my inbox that I have to inspect and delete.
Spam sucked in the 90s, and it sucks harder now. It sucks so hard now that people ( like the parent ) are waxing nostalgic about subject lines that clearly spelled out "Increase you penis size!" in all Roman characters!
Blar.
The long and short of the article and discussion seems to be that the situation small businesses are in isn't distinguishable from spam in many cases. The moral of this story is don't be a small business.
Reverse lookups are often not under your control. Your ISP gives you IP addresses that they maintain the reverse lookups for.
You might be a "fool" if there's an infected machine on your network, but many small businesses are putting out too many fires to see what sorts of unauthorized machines are getting set up, and it only takes a few hours to turn out enough spam to get someone blacklisted.
A small business I know was blacklisted by a government agency who couldn't get their e-mail -- it was auto-deleted as spam -- and there was absolutely no reason at all. It just was, and the amount of effort required to change it was slightly higher than paying off the deficit.
At my old company everything that the marketing director sent out ended up in my spam box for some reason, even when I started flagging them as "not spam."
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Pretty much anything else, including trying to bend the spirit of these rules, is spam.
Where I work we have very few mailing lists (something like 10) which all contain roughly 50-250 people, depending on the focus. Every one of these mailing lists (think usergroups that want to communicate via email and not forums / newsgroups / other website "groups") is opt-in, and all but 2 are by invite only (which you then need to opt in to).
When you sign up we give you the option of HTML or Plaintext email (our HTML is limited formatting anyway).
We give you the option to set an enddate where we will stop sending you mail from that date onward (we send 1 "renewal" email)
We list our unsubscribe button/link at both the top and the bottom of the email (with a "You elected to receive this email on $date" tag, too).
When you click the link, it doesn't ask you for a password or tell you our systems are down - the link has a unique ID for each person and each mailing that cancels all future emails, excepting the email telling you you've cancelled on $date at $time from $ipaddress.
We get nasty emails and AOL spam emails at least once a month, and we end up getting blacklisted by at least 3 places per year.
If you're going to give your users a "Mark as Spam" button in their email box, they'll use it as a delete button. Make it harder for them to report something as spam than it is to delete! Make them say *why* it's spam, or give them a CAPTCHA or *something*. Shit, even most delete buttons have a confirmation box.
You're a Nigerian businessman who really is sitting on a big stack of money that you need to get out of the country through the help of kind and benevolent strangers, each of whom will be rewarded handsomely for their assistance.
There is no such thing as non-spam commercial email. Period. Ditto with phone calls. I have a life-long blacklist of every business that has ever sent me a single piece of unsolicited mail or called me up to sell me something. There is no room for forgiveness, and no reason. I have even made a practice of closing an account with a business with which I was previously happy with, because they called me "to see if I was interested in any other special promotional offers."
Is it not your time? Is it not an interruption? Is it not your inbox and phone line? Then I urge others to take this same approach.
This isn't a /. poll, so I'm allowed to complain about this, right?
How about using opt-in instead of opt-out to begin with?
Any piece of marketing I receive in my mailbox that I didn't say "yes, send me your crap" (and there actually are a few places where I told them to send me their crap), are spam. I do not consider an automatically populated checkbox at the bottom of a "you must make yourself a login account to buy something from us" page as solicitation for marketing. I shouldn't have to work to ensure your business does not send me crap I don't want...if I didn't specifically ask for it, I don't want it. I also wish that these spam buttons worked better since despite labeling ticketmaster's spam as such for every mailing they sent me in the past year, they still show up in my inbox.
I don't get it. I'm just trying to sell people some high quality v1@gr@. I can't sell the stuff on the streets...I don't know how to pronounce it correctly in real life...
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Let me just clear the tears out of my eyes.. phew, okay.
Excuse me if I don't worry too much about businesses trying to send "legitimate marketing emails". Think about it...
What is their motivation?
Email is a good delivery platform because everyone reads their email.
However, spammers have ruined email for "legitimate businesses", by making us develop better and better filters to automatically remove spam/marketing from our inboxes.
What is the consequence? That email is no longer a viable transport system for marketing. Hear that? Spam proves that email is NOT a good marketing channel.
Simple: they will go back to their previous techniques.
I don't see how this is a problem. The public has made it clear: Email is not intended for marketing. Use other channels.
We have simply drawn a line in the sand, the existence of spam filters is a message to companies out there who want to abuse email: "We don't want it." I don't see how this is a problem. Marketing has plenty of other tricks up their sleeve, they don't need this one.
That place is not my mailbox.
business email *IS* spam.
the only time i accept email from a business is when its about bill payment time, like from the power company or something.
but if John Doe coproration is sending me email, and i currently do not have any servicees with them. its auto spam, i don't care how legitamte the email is or how legit the company is, if they send me email, its spam.
For my previous employment I was stuck in a web-based market research firm that focused on the life sciences, so I got to experience first hand what happens when a legal opt-in user hits the damn spam button.
...). Those usually work. On top of these, the sales side of the house has to sell reports for surveys funded in house (if the survey is commissioned by a third party then they pay for it all and any cash rewards, gifts, whatever. If the surveys is paid by the marketing company, they make their money by selling copies of the report) which means sales has to email their clients list.
The first problem we had was the idea that we were a surveys for money shop, which we weren't. Since we aimed at a very narrow group of people (some 30,000 PhDs that worked in life sciences both in academia and the industry), offering them a couple of bucks for their opinion was not worth it the 5-15 minutes they would take to fill a survey, so instead we appealed to their professional vanity. Anything they added in the additional comments section area at the end of the survey was included in the final report for the survey (400-page monster book crammed with statistical analysis, charts, etc.). We edited them for grammar, not content. This way they felt like they were making a real contribution to the study.
The problem here is that (and we nerds certainly identify with this) PhDs are notoriously absentminded, so they may not recognize the survey invite email and tag it as spam. Depending on the ISP and the mail client, this may just kill further emails to the same person. Or it can get you in a shit list.
If this happens to you on AOL, they cut off your domain. The fix is automatic, in the error messages AOL will instruct you on how to sign into their feedback loop for spam. If somebody tags you as spam, all you have to do is guarantee that person will never get email from you and AOL won't kill the whole domain.
Another problem is the open relays, but I see it as a small issue. There is no way in hell you can run a real open relay for more than a day or two without getting on the real time black lists. Do this once and you will learn your lesson immediately.
A more subtle program is that some marketing people can't write ad copy worth shit. The problem is that on one side we had the survey invite emails, which are generated dynamically and fully address the recipient by his last name and professional title (Dear Dr. Jones
And that's a problem. Why? Because it is a god damn sales email, and it reads exactly like every spam you have received selling you Viagra or penny stocks. Because of this the sales people have to write and rewrite these emails in a way that the heuristics won't match known spam patterns.
Since I was the resident geek, I was stuck trying to figure out why their emails got killed by whatever source. My background is engineering, marketing majors don't like to be told that it is stupid to send an email with the following subject (yea, all caps):
ACT NOW TO BUY YOUR 2007 REPORT ON THE SCIENCES MARKET 20% OFF TFW !!!!!!!!1111!!!
They did not like it when I had them redo that. They also hated when I started filtering these for hot words known to be used in spam emails.
The sad thing is that it was a legitimate shop selling a real product to people that had signed in to receive information on these products, yet to the public eye we were no different than Spam peddlers and stock pump and dump artists.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
The problem with the article is that Business newsletters and "legitimate" marketing are spam.
I don't want them and I am glad if my mail filter gets rid of them.
Remember, the grandaddy GREEN CARD spam that started the whole evil mess was itself "legitimate" -- the guy who sent it to every USENET newsgroup simultaneously did indeed have an above-the-board business to promote, and I presume that some people responded and even got green cards as a result of a then-current government amnesty program. At the time, people complained about USENET commercial postings even if they were legitimate -- comparing them to trying to hold a conversation while salesmen keep sticking their heads in the door: "Hey, ya want a nice LASER DIODE?" or whatever they had. It's impossible -- like a scene from, say, Monty Python. Now why does that sound familiar?...
bloody vikings....
No, doing those things dont cause one to be 'mistaken' for a spammer, doing those things cause you to *be* a spammer. (Although certainly not the only things) The only way not to be a spammer is closed-loop verified subscriptions. And you've got to face that people simply are not going to voluntarily subscribe to advertising. (Making it a condition for receiving some other service is just another way of spamming)
Consumer reports decides what products to include in a review based partly on what sells and they get that information from marketing organizations. If they didn't, they'd have to review and you'd have to wade through a list hundreds of PCs (for example) when you read their magazines. They only review the top sellers, not the ones from "Billy Joe's All-Night Beer Joint, Barber Shop, Beauty Parlour, Bait Shop and PCs"
And if marketing didn't exist, how would you know where to go to look for a TV, for instance? If the local electronics shops didn't put out flyers, or advertise in the phone book, how would you find their brick and mortar locations?
You may live in some utopia where "education" about products is produced at no cost to consumers, but for the vast majority of us, marketing materials at a useful first step in finding out what's available and starting research on what's the best thing to buy.
Not only that, but unless I can consciously remember signing up for a particular mailing list, I'm not going to use its unsubscribe link -- I'm just going to mark it as Spam.
Why? Because an "unsubscribe" link can just as easily be an "this email address is live, sell it to all the other scumbags" link. Unless I know that the organization it's coming from is legit, clicking on an 'unsubscribe' link in an email is considered harmful, and I won't do it.
If you want to send out bulk emails (and I think this is a pretty terrible idea to begin with), you should carefully cull your lists if you don't want to be marked as a spammer. I don't want to get messages from someone for the rest of my life, just because I bought something from them once. At best, that's going to make me regret ever doing business with them. Just because I bought something from your crummy web store, shouldn't give you the right to send crap to me forever; if I haven't made another purchase in a few months, I'm probably not coming back. Roll the old address off of the list, and move on -- you're probably just going into a junk-mail box somewhere anyway. (Or more likely, being "eaten" by Spam Gourmet after the 10 messages from you I told it to let through have come and gone, because I didn't trust your ass not to spam me in the first place.)
The ultimate definition of "Spam" is pretty simple: it's email that people don't want to receive. If you're sending out email to people who would rather not be getting it, you're a spammer, plain and simple. It may not be illegal (yet), but it doesn't mean that it's not obnoxious.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In fact, I would say there is NONE.
Look, we don't let people go around in the street, sneaking their hand into our pockets and putting their business card into it. Why? Because it is too close to an illegal act called pick-pocketing. Similarly, as much as the business men WANT to send out mass mailing, it is time to say:
Hey your business model is too close to an illegal act, so stop doing it.
There are alternatives, and frankly Email is NOT the best way to deliver 're-occuring' messages. You can do things like push technology where someone agrees to have a web site automatically background downloaded into a cache whenever they log on to the internet and stay on for more than 1 minute. A flag can pop up on your tool bar, saying you have unreviewed downloaded pages. I know push technology has failed, but that was in part due to email already being accepted. If we outlaw the email reoccuring mass-mailing, then that will give some form of Push technology an opportunity to fill the niche that email used to take care of.
If we ever want to clean up email, we need to STOP mis-using it ourselves.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Just like the regular "unsubscribe" links in the body of the messages, such a header could be used by the unscrupulous as a way of telling that certain addresses are 'live.'
The only safe way to have an 'unsubscribe' button, would be if it just caused the sender to get a bounced-email message back, so that they didn't have any way of telling whether the address had a person sitting behind it, or whether it was just a dead address.
So, the closest implementation to your proposal, that I can imagine, would basically come down to mandating that all legitimate emailers respect a bounce-back as an "unsubscribe" request. Which doesn't strike me as a particularly bad idea, but the marketdroids would probably scream bloody murder about it (as they do about anything that keeps them from broadcasting their message into your brain, 24/7/365, by any means necessary).
This would still have some problems; spammers sending email with forged return addresses could basically use the bounces as a way of DOSing the forged address, but this happens already so there's no big change.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
on how to prevent the email I sent to an individual person from not being thrown away by their spam filter.
.mac account and Apple's Mail client. Both are worthless. They let spam through and filter email from friends.
For example, yesterday I needed to send a debug build of my software to another guy who works for my company but who is at a customer's site. The purpose was so that he could reproduce a bug that he was seeing over there.
Since he didn't have access to our internal network and he isn't very technical, I decided to email him the file. However, it was too large and over the limit for our Exchange server. So, I used yousendit.com.
An hour later, he still didn't have email and it turns out it was filtered into the spam folder and he didn't see it. I regularly use two different spam filters. One is on our company's Exchange server and the other is with my
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I know it's bad to be called a spammer, but I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to have someone think you're a spammer.
I bet I got some of it wrong.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Bullshit. It was called spam from day one, and regarded as bad netiquete from day one. Yes, even in the 90's. Yes, it was always unwanted: that's why spammers now resort to forging headers and sender addresses in the first place. If people hadn't blocked the first non-forged batches, the need for such disguises wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Briefly: I don't give a fuck whether it's fraudulent or not, it's simply whether it's unsolicited advertising. PERIOD.
Also, oh, fucking please. Appeals to the role of advertising in a capitalist society have to be the most disingenuous spammer excuse nowadays.
Sorry to dawn some basic elementary economic clue upon you, but capitalism and the free market are give and take, supply and demand, service and payment. You get something (e.g., advertising space), and you pay something for it. Capitalism and the free market are nothing more than the mechanisms to find the right price, the right balance point for the needs of _both_ sides.
Capitalism is _not_ about just unilaterally taking whatever you want for free. So please spare me the bullshit excuse already.
We _tollerate_ advertising because it pays for other stuff. You want your ad on TV? You pay some money to subsidize that station's content. Sure, I get to see your ad, but then I also get to see a movie for free. You want your ad on a billboard? You pay some money to the municipality. Sure, I see your ugly ad when I drive to work, but then that's also a little less money on my taxes to maintain the road I drive on. Etc.
That's capitalism, in an over-simplified nutshell: you want something, you pay for it.
Does spam actually do something for us, to be tollerated like that too? Does it pay for my internet connection or something? Well, no, it doesn't. On the contrary, it jacks up everyone else's costs by needing admins and servers to deal with that deluge. So not only it doesn't pay for anything, it actually costs me money so some idiot can advertise to me.
What spammers do is more like going and spraying your own marketting grafitty on someone's wall for free. Or maybe glueing your own ad poster on every shop window in town, for free. Hey, it's just advertising and capitalism, right? Nope, sorry. There are words for that, e.g., "vandalism", "defacement", etc, but "advertising" or "normal capitalism" aren't among them.
Briefly, I don't fucking care if it's a genuine poster or fraudulent, I just don't want it glued to my house. It's that simple. Ditto for commercial emails. I don't fucking care if it's fraudulent or not, if it's clogging my inbox unsolicited, it's "spam". Plain and simple. There is _no_ such thing as "legitimate advertising" if it's unsolicited bulk mail.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Khasim, you've hit the nail on the head with your analysis that companies should use their own fucking domain.
My friend received an email from Allstate yesterday claiming that her insurance payment was overdue. She was very upset, since she always pays on time. I took a look at the email, and I said, "this is fraudulent" because the email was not sent from Allstate, but from allstate.asdfegadfsgsd-or-something.com. However, the email had lots of other proofs of authenticity, such as her agents name and address and phone number. So, I told her to call up Allstate and double check her account, just in case some hackers broke into Allstate's computers. Turns out it was a legit email, and the domain is some sort of email service that Allstate uses.
Attention companies: If you want people to read your important emails about overdue bills, send a freakin email from your company's domain, not some unknown 3rd party.
I'm signed up to Microsoft's beta mailing list which occasionally invites me in beta's. Some time ago I got a mailing which looked suspicious to me, it linked to go.microsoft.com but redirected to liveint.com and other odd looking domains. It gave me security warnings about incorrect certificates and resulted in a website with the product name and a download button and no graphics or anything.
I reported this to Microsoft's abuse department who said this was a phishing email. A closer look showed that all domains where from Microsoft, the security certificate was recognised by IE, not FF, the layout only loads correctly with Javascript enabled and the download was digitally signed by Microsoft. Still, it broke every rule in how to detect a phishing email and looked so terrible it even fooled Microsoft's own abuse department.
When you send out mailings then take the rules of detecting phishing into account, especially if you have a warning page on your site telling users how to detect phishing emails. The average person who knows about phishing will mark this email as spam.
My freeware games
I actually think it's probably somewhere in the middle.... Without advertising, SOME consumers would purchase goods more in line with their actual needs and desires. BUT - other consumers would wind up making "non-optimal" purchasing decisions, because the lack of advertising made them unaware of the existence of a product or service better-suited to their needs.
In an absolute sense, education always trumps marketing.
But we don't live in a perfect world. Sometimes, a potential buyer is only made aware of a new offering through commercial advertising. He/she doesn't have time to research the "best choice" for *everything* he or she needs. In other cases, the advertising is what prompts him/her to start doing more research. He/she may not end up with the advertised product at all, but he/she used the advertising as a starting point.
Another favorite gimmick they use is the "You asked to receive email on this crap or from a partner". Fine, show me where I asked for this. Who is this partner? When did I ask to receive my millionth email for refinancing or for V1gr3ra? It is just a transparent attempt to get around any laws saying you can't send it unless it was asked for or you did business with them.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
All commercial e-mail is Spam
That's the silliest thing I've read in a long time.
I subscribe to a number of mailing lists to find out when sales at companies I like are going on. I get mail from REI, Campmor, Frontier, Newegg, and a few others. I save money this way. I like money. When I want to unsubscribe from these emails, I click on the link - I don't report mail as spam unless it's actually spam. All of those newsletters I just talked about are commercial email.
Do you consider catalogs you subscribe to junkmail?
Do you consider coupons you get from companies you've asked to receive coupons from junkmail?
Unfortunately - it's viewpoints like that of the parent that are contributing to the spam blocking problem, creating a huge gray area of marketers who get caught in all kinds of filters because users are "complaining" about email they once opted in to, but are now too lazy to click the "unsubscribe" link.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
This is good. When legitimate businesses realize there are consequences for doing anything that looks like spamming, they'll be more careful.
We're actually winning on spam. There aren't that many different spammers left. The volume of spam is way up because of botnets, but the number of different incoming spams is way down. Notice how few different spams you get.
The remaining spammers are all committing multiple felonies. Notice that when one of them gets caught, which happens a few times a year now, they go to jail. For years.
Progress against spam is slow, but real.
How is it hypocrisy that people do not want to be bothered with being asked to buy something they are not interested in? When I am in the market for something, whether it be a car, a new computer, or even a bar of soap I research the available options and I buy what meets my needs. Before the Internet, that was a difficult task and all you could do was go to your local store and evaluate your options based on the propaganda that was on the packaging. Now, you can read consumer reviews on just about everything. Including a bar of soap. Why do I need to be told I should buy something when I am not in the market for it? If I am watching television and I am forced to sit through a commercial for an air cleaner when I already have an excellent air cleaner in my home, I see that as a complete waste of my time. I personally despise marketing in all its various forms. I use a DVR to watch television and I will wait 30 minutes before starting an hour-long program to avoid the commercials. By the time I reach the end of the program after skipping the commercials, I have caught up with realtime programming. I don't even bother watching Comedy Central because they show 5 30-second commercials for every 4 minutes of content. That is outrageous! I use a Barracuda SPAM filter to filter SPAM just for my home account because I have been a SPAM fighter for the last 10 years and I absolutely hate it. Just because I want to evaluate a piece of software for a company does not mean I want to be bombarded with advertisements for their other software that I don't need. Sure, if they do not hear from me after I have evaluated their software, I don't mind if they send me a message asking me if I am still interested. But, to be constantly bombarded with messages about all of their other products (as well as the products of their "partners") is simply wrong. I am willing to bet that there are some consumers out there that genuinely enjoy receiving SPAM, junk snail-mail, and even enjoy watching commercials. Good for them and I hope they get all they can handle. But simply buying a subscription to a magazine about a subject I enjoy does not mean I want to receive advertisements soliciting me to buy every other magazine that publisher sells. That is the root of the problem these days. We enter into a business relationship with ONE company for ONE product. And those companies use it as an opportunity to sell us everything else under the sun. Perhaps if the marketing executives would consider that fact, there wouldn't be such a consumer backlash against marketing.
People have better ways to find things out than being fed lies, deception and FUD. We have schools, we have newspapers (or had, before the PR assholes started disguising FUD and deception as articles), we have libraries, etc, to actually find things out.
If you look at history, we remember stuff like, say, the great library of Alexandria, _not_ some big Egyptian marketting campaign. We remember the schools of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, _not_ some great ancient spammer. And if that information even got to us, we can thank some monasteries who worked dilligently to copy the manuscripts, not some medieval "enlarge thy phalus to the size of the Spanish Armada" spam campaign.
Here's some information: until _very_ recently (as in 19'th century or so, and even then in homoeopathic doses for anything that wasn't snake oil) marketting wasn't even need at _all_, and tended to not even exist. In an economy of scarcity, you don't need to distort everyone's perception to sell your stuff, you just need to bring it to the market. It'll sell itself. Trust me, when Venice or later Portugal brought a ship loaded spices from Asia, they didn't need to bulk-send leaflets hyping them: people would buy them anyway.
The disproportionate need for marketting to sell stuff is _very_ recent and a result of the economy of abundance. Large companies are no longer limited by how much they can produce, but by how much they can sell. Everyone can over-produce pretty much anything. Coca Cola or Pepsi could ramp their production to drown the whole world, Nike could make shoes for everyone on the whole planet, etc. The limit is demand nowadays. And we've already been at the point of just trying to produce more and dump them cheaper, that's how the Great Depression happened. So nowadays we end up hiring more people to create an artificial demand by marketting, than to actually produce stuff.
But again, that's a very recent phenomenon. If you picked even someone from the 17'th or 18'th century, much less a caveman, and try to tell them that somewhere there's a society where you need to beg and convince people to buy your goods, they'd think you're seriously deluded or telling them some kind of fable. The whole notion was simply alien, as the wold economy was simply always at a point where agregate demand vastly outstripped aggregate supply. Even if one place had an exceptional year and over-produced grain, two-three other places were having a severe famine, so some merchant would come and buy your grain anyway.
So basically, oh please. If you're trying to tell me that marketters got us out of the stone age and got us educated, that's on par with claiming that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy did it. It's just that ludicrious.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No! Remove any self-identifying information and then tear up the paperwork and send it back to them in their own postage-paid envelope. Toss some small rocks in there just for good measure since they pay the return postage by weight. Once you've done this a few times, it become second nature and only takes a moment.
Our abuse alias get 100,000 to 200,000 emails a day, about half of it spam but most of the other half mail bombs from ill-informed random morons who've been joe-jobbed, or occasionally, haven't heard of subnets (we have some /25 IP allocations, some of which we unfortunatly share the other half of with borderline dodgy ISPs.)
/.ers like to bitch about, that is block port 25 and force customers to use our own mailers.
Vigilantism makes it harder for us to detect and track down the few legitimate abose complaints among the mail bombs. We can't monitor all outgoing mail from all customers unless we do what
Your mailbox is never stuffed with advertisements. I bet you've never had someone hang a ad for a poplular pizza joint on your door handle. And of course you'd never find pamphlets on your car window. It would be like...pickpocketing?
I certainly understand your frustration, but bad analogies suck.
And of course you miss the areas where mass mailings *are* legitimate. Ever go to school? Ever taken a course survey?
We certainly get too much and too many we don't want, expect and didn't sign up for. I send mass emails out about once every 2 months. I run a website about music and arts and its a community project so I like to let people know what we've been doing, whats changed and what we have planned (interviews, features, etc) to give them a chance to respond. There are legitimate uses for lists.
Like-wise, I sign up for a number of lists. Some for artists (its hard to keep on top of everyone, so its nice to get news about new work), some for business (Oracle, Centos for patches/updates). It would be a nightmare if I had to poll all this information regularly myself.
And on top of that mass mailing is a fact of life right now. I don't see the harm in having dialog about how to make the impact, from a business perspective, on the recipient less. Thats good business that actually helps me for a change. Its a shame that serious conversations about best-practices typically end in yelling matches. Because there is *a lot* business could learn *and* benefit from.
Quack, quack.
who believe that somehow segregation is okay as long as it's self imposed
Completely off-topic, but I'm curious. The tone of your post implies you believe self-imposed segregation is NOT okay. Why not?
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
All email marketing is spam. Period. Anything that I receive that was not expected or requested is spam. It doesn't matter if you're selling a larger penis or shoes. It doesn't matter if I am already a customer. This goes for snail mail and phone calls. Just because I bought something from a company once doesn't mean I should suffer perpetual interruption of my time.
"The ultimate definition of "Spam" is pretty simple: it's email that people don't want to receive. If you're sending out email to people who would rather not be getting it, you're a spammer, plain and simple. It may not be illegal (yet), but it doesn't mean that it's not obnoxious."
But honestly, how do they KNOW you don't want it unless they give it a try? (I'm 100% serious here. I want your response.)
If they're intentionally misspelling words to get around your filter, they KNOW that you don't want it in your inbox.
The big difference is whether you are contributing or leeching on the distribution system.
/. contributes to the running cost of the site, and is legitimate marketing. Putting a add in a signature may or may not be, it depend on the policy of the site. The site owners may believe that th contribution in form of the message is "worth" the price of the add, and they may not believe so. Anyone involved in legitimate marketing will respect that. A leech will not.
The original Canter & Siegel spam was in no way "legitimate", it was leeching (and ultimately destroying) on the infrastructure it was using.
Legitimate marketing, on the other hand, contribute to the infrastructure it is using. A banner add on
A quick test to see if you are a leech or a legitimate marketeer: Have you found an advertising channel that is free or much cheaper than the conventional channel? If so, you are almost certainly a leech.
But honestly, how do they KNOW you don't want it unless they give it a try? (I'm 100% serious here. I want your response.)
Easy; assume I don't want it unless I request it. If I write a personal email to someone, like to customer service, I expect a response. If I order something, I assume they'll send me a confirmation. I don't want an email a week for the next 50 years.
That's just common sense: if you don't know whether the person on the other end will want to receive something or not, don't send it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Hypothetical situation. You and a friend are emailing each other.
Your friend's ISP software parses your email address and runs it through a spam filter. Ok, not spam, it goes to his inbox. And it goes on a list of valid email to be shipped off to anyone who wants it.
Seeing as how it would be VERY difficult to track this back to the ISP, it'd be a bit of revenue for the ISP. All they'd have to do is make sure their spam filters are at least decent and as long as not too many people notice, they won't lose many customers over the amount of spam coming in at all.
So even if you only use your email address to trusted friends, you cannot trust every man in the middle or parsing router on the way.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I don't see the problem.
Confidentiality comes to mind. Sometimes, you prefer to have your server contact the recipient's server directly via TCP rather than relaying stuff through ISPs mailhost. Of course, it makes only sense when using end-to-end encryption as well (PGP).
And even if ISP can't read PGP traffic, they can still do some cheap traffic analysis if you relay through their server. They could do this as well at the TCP layer; but that's not as trivial to set up than simply analyzing mailhost's logfiles...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I've faced this problem over and over.
Does anyone know how to get off of the AOL blocked list? Most services seem to have a method to test one's server, then certify that it is not forwarding spam, etc. But AOL? It's like a giagantic "No Fly" list - no one knows how to get on, no one knows how to get off.
It would REALLY HELP if there was some type of coordination world-wide to stop spamming, and to "certify" or "re-certify" servers that get blocked. In other words, if one does it once, then the "re-certification" would be carried to all services that provide blocking lists.
It would help if there were legislation requiring that all services that provide blocking be held accountable for unjustified blocking.
Saying that all business newsletters are spam isn't really true. *You* may not want it, and if it is being sent to you and you did not request it, then it is spam. I don't usually opt-in for newsletters either, but I recognize that users have a right to want to get a newsletter (maybe a gamer wants a quarterly newsletter highlighting new games their favorite studio is releasing, etc), and that businesses have a right to send newsletters to customers who *want* to receive them. The problem this generates is that businesses need to make sure someone doesn't mistakenly categorize them as spam, so that they now become blocked from all customers at that ISP, or even other ISP's that participate in the same RBL.
the entire industry is built on deception...
The American automakers are entirely truthful in their TV ads!
Ford: "Quality is job 1". Meaning: Piss-poor quality, they really really need to work on it
Plymouth: "We build excitement". Meaning: The brakes are crap and the handling is worse
Chevy: "Like a rock". Meaning: Damned thing broke down again
I just bought an '02 car, what diodn't anybody tell me about the cool automatic mirror dimmers?
I have little sympathy with companies sending marketing email getting branded as junk emailers they are sending Unsolicited bulk or bulk email.
This effects real people as well. Getting blacklisted is a way of life for me online because of my name. Yes Spamer really is my surname/family name. If you have any doubts try searching for me on uk directory enquires / electoral role
Its gotten me accused of being of being a joe-job for trying to do my job as the postmaster for a domain.
Its gotten my email addresses blacklisted, it's gotten me blocked from creating accounts on web-sites including utube and my local newspaper.
Professionals should start call junk email Unsolicited bulk or bulk email instead of using slang.
AOL's email and Internet presence is not RFC-compliant. They do not maintain the RFC-required human-staffed addresses and claim that it's not commercially viable for them to do so.
Since most of you are letting your users communicate with AOL, you are contributing to this dilution of standards and pollution of the Internet ecosystem.
Block their entire network until they are RFC-compliant. They've made it clear that they will not respond to any other action.
And please, don't whine about how your users have to do this that or the other thing and that means allowing AOL. Either find them an alternate path (hello gmail) or just shrug and say "Sorry PHB; AOL is broken and I can't fix their network for them from here. Please feel free to complain to them, but don't believe any of their lies about their service not being broken. If it wasn't broken, you'd be able to email them!"
That way you can afford to send me a letter the next TWO times that the price goes up.
If we're talking money, you do NOT depend upon email. Did you miss the whole point of this thread? Email is NOT sufficiently reliable.
This is a problem, though. I have several AOLers on the mail lists that I maintain for my cycling teams. Every now and then, I get the TOS notification bounced because some AOLer reported a message as Spam. One person reports, all of AOL misses those messages. Dumb.
Rule #1: Don't use e-mail for marketing.
If I want to buy something, I'll come to you. Spend your marketing budget on search engine placement, AdSense, etc., so that when I go out looking for something, you'll be at the top of the list.
If you come to me, off to the Spam Bin you go.
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
The law was supposedly meant to mean it would "can" (get rid of) spam.
:)
Instead, it keeps spam legal with some restrictions, and supersedes state laws making some formerly illegal spam legal.
So it makes it so you "CAN SPAM" legally and how to do it.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
When I first read your post, I thought to myself, "Great, another user messing up the effectiveness of the filters by blurring the line between legit mail and spam." Then I re-read it, and saw the phrase, "unsubscribing which was difficult," and realized you had a point.
IIRC, current law requires a "working" unsubscribe link. I don't think it says anything about making it easy. Best practices, however, do recommend making it easy to unsubscribe.
I find it very interesting that many of the technical mailing lists I'm on are actually easier to use than most marketing lists I've encountered. Mailman-managed lists, for instance: List-Unsubscribe is in the header, so a client could hypothetically include an "Unsubscribe" button. And the only information you need to provide to unsubscribe is your email address.
Common wisdom would have it that lists aimed at a less technical audience would be easier to use, but the opposite seems to be true.
Spam is what we define SPAM to be.
So, even if you are legitimate or whatever (if I receive an e-mail from you and I automatically don't feel all warm and fuzzy like when I receive anything from Sun and think about their freebies bags), if you annoy more than 10% of your auditory - you are a spam. basta.
My inbox is my territory and my property, clearcut as that - and anything that is not welcome in my dining room (without prior notification or invitation) most likely will be absolutely uninvited there. Argue about legitimacy as much as you want, but if it annoys me even for 1/10th of a second when you step on my property or knock at my door - you will be knocked out, asked to get the fuck off or just plainly will be punched in your face.
(what kinda reminds me is that single real-life spammers remaining recently seems to be only those Mormon, 7th day, Christian or whatever is the sect of a day choice idiots. At least this means that rest of them has given up, so hopefully such tactics might work on interpipes too.)
...is to omit your business name from the "From" and "Subject" of your emails.
Almost nobody opens emails from "personal" addresses when they don't know the person. Trust me in this, it's my job.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
It sounds to me like it all boils down to 1 misstep: sending spam! While the official definition of spam under the CAN-SPAM act and other regulations may be a bit more hazey, most businesses sending mass mailings pretty much know that 90% of the recipients don't want it.
1. Ignoring "unsubscribe" requests.
90% of the time, when I sned an unsubscribe request it's because I never subscribed in the first place and that message gets the "This Is Spam" flag even after I've sent my unsubscribe request.
2. List "repurposing."
That's not mistakenly being labeled spam. That's real, honest-to-goodnes spam.
3. Providing unclear privacy checkbox instructions, and ignoring users' responses.
Opt-out isn't the default? Yup, that's spam.
4. Losing track of internal desktop and server machines that can be used against you.
Okay, so this one really is a bit unfortunate if the company's machine got hacked and they weren't the ones sending the spam from that IP. But why didn't the firewall block SMTP outbout except for specified mail servers?
5. Not keeping databases and address lists up to date.
Old mailing list? Spam necessarily involves computers. Use them for a bit of change control. If you sent it and I didn't want it, that's spam!
6. Having vulnerable mailer forms on your Website.
Just like number 4, if you've got enough money to run a commercial mailing list, you've got enough money to pay your web programmers to do it right. This would be an unfortunate mistake, but hardley unavoidable.
7. Working with non-reputable third-party mailers.
Also unfortunate, but isn't there an implied warrenty of merchantability on services? If you pay a company to manage mailings and they ruin your good name/e-mail address/IP, wouldn't you be entitled to at least a refund and possibly damages?
I hit the spam button for absolutely every email that was not written specially for me. Any sort of commercial mail: SPAM. I don't give a fuck if they got my email address "legitmately" from some purchase I made or whatever. I NEVER WANT TO RECIEVE ANY MASS EMAIL WHATSOEVER.
The problem with people fighting spam is that they always say "we need to block spam, but still allow legitmate email lists." FUCK THAT! In my opinion, the whole spam problem should be fixed by saying that an email cannot have more than (for example) 40 recipients. This can be enforced at the mail-server level (and is especially easy for big services like gmail and yahoo).
If someone WANTS to opt-in to some mass communication, I would suggest something designed for that, like RSS. Email should be for private 1-on-1 communication, in my opinion. So basically, when you send me mail asking if I want to sign up for that new credit card, don't be surprised when I mark you as spam!
Your name is Alan Richter or Scott Ralsky...
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Now of course it should be easy to get off mailinglists and stores should not start mailing you offers unless you've previously accepted it. In Denmark it's illegal to send commercial email to private persons without prior consent. You must at least check a checkbox on a webpage before mail can be sent legally.
The problems with subscription newsletters are twofold: (1) abuse by companies who won't unsubscribe you or who make you jump through hoops to unsubscribe (compare to private mailman(1) or majordomo(1) mailing lists, where you can unsubscribe just by sending the command "unsubscribe" -- most commercial newsletters do not allow that), and (2) the huge noise-to-signal ratio in corporate/commercial e-mail.
Any corporation with half a brain should be on a "pull" system with a web newsletter.
> We would be a bunch of people in caves not trusting each other and killing each other
> because they took your club.
Riiiiiiight, because advertising is the backbone of human civilization, not at all the palsying scourge on humankind that the rest of the world outside of your little bullshit intentions thinks it is.
> I will just do what I consider to be the right thing and be respectful of your time and not
> waste much of it and be as unintrusive as possible.
Hey asshole, it's not yours to waste, any of it, at all, ever, for any reason whatsoever.
No, really.
*Fuck* *you*
It's four years later. I'm still getting the crap. And it's categorized as spam.
I should call IT and have their addresses blocked. Then I can just read Slashdot all day.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Byrd, into the oblong,
Brazil, of humid heat,
Typesetting, at that same,
Brassiere, bang everybody turned.
Jesus Saves
Why use a new kludge when ftp has been around for a long time? You just have to send them the link (containing username and password) and they can pick the file up in their web browser. It's a minor time consumer to set up the first time but worth it in the end for this situation, and every sysadmin on earth is capable of doing it - you just have to make sure you comply with security policies where you are. Some people may suggest changing the file size limits on your mail server but that won't work if you hit the same problem at the other end.
Example:
Get a random sample of people to try all the Chinese food in town.
If a statistically significant number of people think Ho-Lee-Chow's food is the best, then it is.
It should be called "5 ways to BE a spammer, 2 ways to be a zombie."
1. Ignoring Unsubscribe requests - The second you do this, your email is unsolicited and you are a spammer.
2. List repurposing - Ditto.
3. Providing unclear privacy checkbox instructions, and ignoring users' responses. - Ignoring users requests to not be emailed = unsolicited. Spammer.
4. Losing track of internal desktop and server machines that can be used against you. - Zombie
5. Not keeping databases and address lists up to date. - See #1-3
6. Having vulnerable mailer forms on your Website. - Zombie
7. Working with non-reputable third-party mailers. - See 1-3, 5
*cough* Symantec
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
.name never seemed to take off so about 3 years ago I registered my name as a .info. The other month, a local college's firewall wouldn't even let my DSL server's URL pass in the _body_ of an email to a friend at the college.
Actually, I wouldn't be _too_ surprised, given how and when the Great Depression happened, and how the economy worked ever since.
Basically what happened there was that everyone could produce (and actually tried to produce) more stuff than they could possibly sell, and that was already after such inventions as planned obsolescence. And the way out involved essentially the government spending some of everyone's money, and some money it didn't even have, to create extra demand. (Think not just the New Deal in the USA. The building tanks in Germany and Italy, or the massive forced industrialization in the USSR acted as just the same: government demand creating more jobs.) We're already at a point where a ridiculous amount of the aggregate demand comes from the government, and don't think just the direct money spent by the government, but also the keynesian multiplier effect: company X who got a bunch of money from a government contract, goes and buys trucks and materials from companies Y and Z, which in turn spend their gains somewhere else. And, of course, on top of that we have the status games that you mention.
So, yeah, a huge part of the aggregate demand nowadays is status games, government spending, planned obsolescence games, etc, and all the marketting jobs and research jobs that go into that. And at least at 40 hours a week we actually _need_ those to make demand meet supply.
So, yeah, I wouldn't be that surprised. I don't know the exact number of hours a week that would work, but yeah, a lot less could work just fine if someone managed to figure out a way for the economy to work without all that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This 'spam button' isn't just trouble for businesses doing email marketing at all. Some of the worst offenders being AOL users. Example situation: Some nice lady has a web site and email, she uses her email for things like family communications, coordinating the holidays and sending out the "Here's where we're vacationing this year" emails... One of her friends & family is an AOL user and CONSTANTLY marks her emails as spam! AOL's complaint emails don't offer any clues about who the complainer is, the hosting customer is completely clueless and ZERO help at all. Of course she's going with shared hosting so all sites outbound mail comes out from the same IP address and blacklisting affects everyone on the server, with no real way to resolve the issue.
Similar situation. Old domain hosted on shared hosting; Users decide to forward all their site email to their AOL address and add the alias. As mail is forwarded the shared server gets in the header, the user reports all the spam they get and the physical IP of the server gets blacklisted affecting hundreds of other customers trying to send email! (and of course spam filtering doesn't happen before the alias forwarded the email) The clueless user probably doesn't even realize this isn't just an easy way to sort mail but it actually HURTS people and makes business difficult for potentially hundreds of businesses including the hosting service left to pull their hair out!
The larger the company the more impossible (*cough* AOL) it is to work around small problems and shared servers and the like, mail servers which do far less volume than say Comcast or AT&T just can't be singled out as known legit servers - AOL doesn't have time to deal with them.
I've always been BIG on getting users to report spam, to fight it and help prevent it. Prevention before treatment! It's the only thing that makes sense and I believe it may have contributed heavily to spam being allowed to get so far out of control. But if the user doesn't even know what goes on as a result of that button click... It probably does more harm than good.
Spam Thwart: Anti-Spam Collective