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.
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!
#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?
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
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
"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
... 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...
>> 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.
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.
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."
Only in the absense of data protection laws. Try this in the EU and the fines will be a lot more than whatever you might have made by selling the list.
It's more than that Firstly (at least in the UK) it's a criminal offence, for which you get a record, and the fines are unlimited (for a large breach you can write off your company there and then). Plus they can serve you with an enforcement notice - preventing you from processing personal data (wave byebye to your customer database) and that's backed by criminal law too.
See the out-law summary
Needless to say here we take the DPA *very* seriously.
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
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.
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."