Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
#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.
"All commercial e-mail is Spam"
Wrong.
Legally there are commercial emails that aren't spam.
And I want an email from several companies we do business with. These are all BnM stores usually sending us coupons.
A lot of people do business with companies that they have done business with in the past.
""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."
That example is in the top 100 worst example ever posed on slashdot.
I am nearly speechless at how inept it is. It's like a 5 inch penis at a porn convention. Lost AND unwanted.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
>> 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.
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 signed up for these emails, I like getting these emails, and I could easily unsubscribe to these emails. However, I know that at least one of these lists has had trouble with getting spam-filtered.
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."
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.
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."