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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."
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.
I have a site that follows said rules.
I have a form that sends a verification email to the recipient that the recipient must reply to in order to receive newsletters and to be eligible to win a monthly prize we give away.
80% of AOL users that fill out the form tell AOL that the verification email is SPAM.
4% of the AOL users in the current database reports the newsletters as SPAM.
With that being said, we are seriously thinking if removing all AOL users from our database and not allowing AOL email addresses to be used.
We've said it time and time again yet we always 'wait another month'.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
As an addition to #1, I hate websites that require you to enter a password to UNSUBSCRIBE. Like their marketing emails are so precious that they don't want anyone else unsubscribing you. Yeah.... Most likely you would have forgotten said password.
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!
If I want money then I have to put up with advertising? That's just not true. Moreover, I believe that even 'legitimate' marketing materials, when mailed to my house or displayed on my tv count as spam, which to me is unwanted solicitations. In the case of TV I can tivo-skip commercials and with snail mail and telemarketing I can cut it down with the DMA opt-out. So according to you, I'm not really a consumer, even though I spend tons of money each year just living here. I just don't think that capitalism will stop because advertising does. Ads are just a convenient way to supercharge sales at the expense of the consumers.
Untargeted advertising is not a waste of money for the advertiser if they can get as little as 1-2% of the eyeballs interested. Think about that. That means 98-99% of the people viewing these ads DO NOT WANT YOUR CRAP. Sure, it's good for the advertiser, but terrible for consumers. The more ads show up, the more people try to avoid them. I don't think most people like being marketed at. Even with businesses with whom they have a 'prior relationship'. People tolerate a certain amount of advertising to get the benefits of otherwise 'free' tv (don't get me started on cable tv ads). That doesn't make it any less spam, or any less obnoxious.
Think of it this way: if in your personal life you spend a portion of each of your conversations with people trying to sell them something, how many of them will try to avoid you at parties? I sure would. Now explain to me why businesses should be any different. I'm not saying that you should not be allowed to do this; I'm only explaining why some people think you're hell incarnate.
steampunk web design
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?
I think you're going after a bit of a strawman here.
It is true that back in the 90s, when the Internet was primarily an academic network, people freaked when it started to be used for marketing. But that's water long under the bridge.
The problem isn't that deceptive spam makes email useless for legitiamte marketing. The problem is that spam makes email useless for communication.
Google has shown its not advertising that's the problem. It's interference.
The fundamental tenet of capitalism is that if people are free to make rational choices, they will optimize their welfare. I think that while exceptions certainly exist to this idea, it is reasonably correct. However, this presupposes that people have the freedom to direct their attention where they would like to, and to make decisions without interference. In other words, capitalism requires not only the freedom of marketers, but the privacy of consumers to achieve optimal results.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If I feel the need to purchase a product of category X, I'm going to inform myself through hopefully neutral sources. Marketing doesn't count, since it it biased by default.
Capitalism needs marketing
I think what you're trying to say is "A free market economy needs marketing". Which still isn't quite true. In theory, a free market economy needs informed consumers that can chose the best product in order to be beneficial as a whole (i.e. produce the best goods at the lowest prices). Marketing, in its purest sense, tries to influence the choice of the customers by trying to replace "the best product" with "our product", usually by exploiting psychological loopholes and intentional misinformation. The resulting "Consumer economy" then does not favor the best products and the lowest prices, but the companies that market their crap best while still being able to overcharge the customer and provide lousy quality.
How well the latter works is shown by reality(tm). Spout enough marketing at your consumers and they'll buy any crap at any price and put up with even the lousiest quality.
... 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...
This brings up an interesting possibility. Since so many users are now using the same few well-established web-based email services, why not establish some sort of a protocol for passing an 'unsubscribe' link in the header, and ask the web-based email service providers to show an 'unsubscribe' button, adjacent or instead of the 'spam' button?
This leaves some room for exploitation, but this can be resolved if companies get white listed to be able to use this feature.
Wow, nasty attitude you have there. If someone actually signed up for something they should take the time to unsubscribe from it. I run a mid-size mailing list (about 1000 users) that doesn't advertise anything (it belongs to a professor who sends out summaries of news articles that relate to his field to students and other professors). Yet I have to go talk to Yahoo and AOL every so often because someone couldn't bother to read the "To unsubscribe from this list send an email to thelistname-unsubscribe@mydomain.com" line at the bottom of EVERY FREAKIN EMAIL and clicked the spam button instead. Never mind the fact they had to email "thelistname-subscribe@mydomain.com" to subscribe in the first place.
:-P.
Feel free to not give a shit about my opinion as well. But I just think this is the equivalent of inviting someone over, then keying his car when you want them to leave.
To head off the "lol, I bet the list spams anyway" crowd:
The only way to get on the list is to send an email to the subscribe address, which sends a "Are you sure?" message back.
It's announce style, only the professor can send email out on it, everything else is discarded. I've yet to have something bad slip through.
If email it sends bounces a few times to an address, it unsubcribes the address (Mailman handles that all for me).
The addresses collected for this list are used for no commercial purposes at all. Only the professor sends the mail, and he isn't selling anything
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.
This is so true. I manage an ISP with over 10,000 email users and the amount of 'SPAM' we get in the AOL feedback loop is ridiculous. Less than 10% of it is anything even close to spam. Most of it is email from people who clearly know and correspond with the user who marked it as SPAM. It's personal messages, occasional jokes, and I can't count how many times the message marked as 'SPAM' actually is a reply to a message sent from the user in the first place. AOL user's just use the Mark as SPAM button to remove anything they don't want. We have a numerically high SPAM count with AOL (percentage is about average they said), and when I talked with them about this, and had them LOOK at what their users were flagging as SPAM they just said oh well, their users marked it as SPAM so that's what it is. AOL actually (temporarily) rejects email based on this ludicrous scheme. Letting the user's decide what's SPAM like this undermines the very effectiveness of communication on the Internet.
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
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.
I'm a member of Blockbuster Online (use to be NetFlix). I sometimes get emails from Blockbuster on in-store sales... heck, I even got one asking me to join Blockbuster online, months after I was a member! Oddly enough, I checked off all the 'send me special offers' boxes in my account, but I still get these emails a couple times a month. These, while technically 'unsolicited', I do not consider spam because of my membership status. If I where to stop being a member, and receive these emails, I would consider them spam.
Likewise, my company sends out an E-Newsletter to many of reps, customers, and showrooms. Most of these people have not specifically opted in to the newsletter in the first place, but due to the business relationship, also do not (generally) consider this spam.
Now speaking of Netflix, I will get an email on rare occasions from them. "Rejoin now for only $X.XX". I'll get this maybe 1 every couple months, and less frequently as time goes on. I consider this spam. Why? I was a member of Netflix? Yes, but the reason I consider is spam is because the $X.XX is NOT a special 'rejoin' offer price. It's the standard list price. They have no need to tell me to rejoin at the regular price. I already know that. It's a tricky attempt to deceive a customer and I do not appreciate that and consider that spam. If it was a real 'special offer', then I would be ok with that.
I hope that clears up some of your question. Strictly 'unsolicited' is not what I'm going for. And likewise, in the case of Blockbuster, I get 2 emails a month (besides my 'your DVD has shipped/returned'), I do not consider that bulk. If I got 1 Credit card letter a month, I wouldn't be so bothered by it. Instead, I usually get 1 a week... from (what it feels like) every credit card company/bank. =)
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
Oh, and one relevant thing I forgot to mention. I can't find the source now, but I believe it was the eminent Bucky Fuller who predicted that if we eliminated the extra effort going towards the "status" or "positional" aspect of the goods we consume, we could satisfy all of our needs PLUS entertainment wants on two hours of work per week. I think that's an exaggeration, of course, but I'd agree a huge fraction is due to zero-sum status games.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Well put. If you assume that marketing is only done by commercial enterprises.
All the things that you mention (the Great Library of Alexandria, ancient monks copying manuscripts) happened because someone had a vested interest in those things happening , and successfully sold them to someone else who had the means to make them happen. The connection might not be direct. e.g. The monks were driven by their beliefs to copy manuscripts (primarily religious texts), because they had been "sold" the idea that Christianity was the way to eternal salvation.
If you look at other ancient marvels, the marketing connection is more obvious... with apologies to the followers of Horus, the pyramids were built because the religious leaders found a good way to pump up the egos of the Pharoahs.
What happened was that marketing moved from being an activity pursued mainly by kings and religions to become something that business did as well. Actually, I think you'll find marketing by businesses started to happen as soon as businesses began to compete on a broad geographical basis, which was basically when the roads and rail systems became efficient and there was a reliable monetary system (see e.g. Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle vol. 43, pp. 5,292 - 5,313).
I'm not saying marketing is a good thing. Just that it's been around for a lot longer than you acknowledge, and is probably inevitable given freedom of speech, and an incentive to do so.