PREFACE: If you had asked me back in 1998 if I would ever arrive at the conclusions and advice given below, I would have vigorously denied it as a possibility. Unfortunately, at that time, I did not foresee the devastating abuse of email marketing that has happened since that time. So, at the risk of alienating many of our best marketing friends, I must now propose the following, just to maintain our ethical standards:
The Golden Rule: NEVER buy email addresses from another company!
Yes, I know, many of us find the mere suggestion of this rule shocking. However, the fantastic "democratization" of advertising made possible by the onset of email technology has now reached a point described by many economists as a "tragedy of the commons." This means that the availability of email for marketing purposes has allowed so many untrained and unethical people access, that this once awesome resource for business promotion has been all but destroyed.
Under present day circumstances, here is the bottom line: No legitimate company will ever sell you a list of email addresses. Anyone selling you lists of email addresses is very simply a spam outfit. Many spam outifts, such as 'Neuport Internet Marketing' to name one, offer lists of email addresses for sale. If you have been sold a list of email addresses which the seller promises are "opt-in", you have been conned.
Sending any bulk email to a purchased list is guaranteed to get you in trouble for spamming, since none of the addresses on the purchased list consented to receive bulk emails from you.
All advertisements for "Millions of opt-in email addresses" or "Millions of targetted email addresses" are fraudulent. No matter how legitimate the seller's web site looks, or how much the seller promises you the addresses are bona-fide, never get suckered into buying any email address list.
(The Exception Which Proves The Rule is when a legitimate COI list is transfered from one owner to another owner, exclusively, such as in a company buyout, with all the subscription agreements retained including the topic of the list. COI records should be transfered as part of the agreement. That is obviously a special case, and very different from buying generic lists which are repeatedly resold to multiple buyers.)
What is "confirmed opt-in"?
Confirmed opt-in (COI) is a process by which a bulk email marketer automatically verifies that an opt-in request did in fact come from the email address owner and was therefore not spoofed, mistakenly or fraudulently subscribed. COI is the only legitimate way of operating a mailing list.
For the user subscribing to a list, COI is as simple as replying to an automated confirmation e-mail or clicking a link in an automated confirmation e-mail. In professional list management software, COI utilizes a unique token (sort of like a single-use password) passed from the list software to the would-be subscriber, and the subscriber returns the token to confirm their permission. Such "closed-loop confirmation" has been Best Current Practice in mailing list management software since about 1996. Software handles all the token transactions and maintains logs to document each and every subscription.
All professional mailing list management products support COI, some proprietary and some open-source (free). Communigate Pro, MajorDomo, EZMLM, MailMan, and Lyris are a few of the names of such products.
If the recipient is given the choice to opt-out, is it still spam?Spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email. If you send any bulk email to a recipient who did not request it from you or did not give their prior and informed consent to be subscribed to your list, you are spamming that recipient. Whether you offer an opt-out option in the message or not does not change the fact that the recipient has been sent Unsolicited Bulk Email, spam.
Nobody must ever be required to opt-out of anything they did not opt-in to in the first place. Given all the nasty and infectious material circulated by spammers, the endless tricks spammers employ to get users to click links to websites which on arrival infect their computers with Trojans, it can never be recommended that anyone click on any links in any unknown e-mail.
What is the right way to send bulk e-mail?
This is intended only as a basic outline of what it takes to manage a legitimate bulk e-mail list. Seek expert advice from appropriate companies and consultants for a more complete understanding of the complicated issues of legitimate bulk e-mail. Remember, all bulk e-mail must be opt in, otherwise it is unsolicited. And Unsolicited Bulk E-mail (UBE) is spam!
1. Address acquisition - Make sure it's Opt In! If the recipient didn't ask for it in the first place, the rest of the list management processes are irrelevant. While various transactions and business relationships can infer permission, if there's any doubt, or for any on-going bulk e-mail relationship, closed-loop Confirmed Opt In (COI) is the gold standard for verifying permission, in use since about 1997. Some examples of software which use COI include Majordomo-2, EZMLM, Mailman, and Lyris. (Search for these names in Google for more info).
For more on COI, see:
http://www.spamhaus.org/mailinglists.html
http://www.spamhaus.org/permissionpass.html
http://nct.digitalriver.com/ecm/doihowto/
2. Truth in advertising - State your policies and the nature of the bulk e-mail at the point of subscription. Tell the subscriber what to expect: how often, how big, what kind, what topics and content, etc. Don't hide information about the subscription on remote pages, behind hyperlinks, or buried in jargon, legalese, and obfuscation.
3. Identify yourself, or at least your company or organization. Use properly registered domains with working mail and web addresses. Have a website at those domains which properly identifies your company. Don't hide behind ever-changing mazes of domains. Anonymized "whois" records just shout "hey, I'm trying to hide something!" Do you buy your electronics off the back of unmarked trucks in an alley? Make bank withdrawals while wearing a ski mask? Make your online identity as solid as a brick-and-mortar business!
4. Maintenance - Keep your list current! Remove unsubscription requests and bounces promptly, as close to real-time as possible, on the same day at least. Mail the list at regular intervals. Unmailed lists provoke high complaint rates when they reactivate, even from truly opt-in addresses. Addresses "churn" over time, that is, they are abandoned or re-used. For most commercial lists, mail at least once per week and remove any address with three sequential bounces, or with sequential bounces for more than two weeks.
5. Bounce processing - Respect what the recipient's server tells you. SMTP "5xy" codes mean "NO!" Bouncing your mail off the filters but showing up in the logs, or resuming spamming after filter rules come down, is a sure-fire way to really annoy server operators and mailbox owners alike. Addresses being converted to spamtraps will typically reject (5xy) all deliveries for about six months...you certainly don't want those on your list so make sure they bounce off!
6. Unsubscription must work! Promptly. And for all the bulk mail you're sending to that address. It must work via e-mail (include correct info in headers) and many subscribers also appreciate a web link included in message body. Sign up for feedback loops and consider that abuse reports may indicate more serious problems than can be fixed by simply unsubscribing the reporting address. Some jurisdictions also require snail-mail unsubscribe processing. Basically, if someone wants off your list, help them with their request no matter how they ask.
7. Concurrency - Respect the receiving server's SMTP dialogue. If it says pipelining allowed, give it what it wants. If it accepts a bit slowly, throttle back your server so as not to flood smaller sites. Opening up lots of threads to a slow server is an excellent way to get tarpitted and blocked.
8. Seek expert advice! There are highly qualified deliverability consultants, and some who aren't so qualified...buyer beware. Ask your ISP for advice. Consider a reputable E-mail Service Provider (ESP). If any deliverability consultant is not aware of the terms and problems in this very brief outline -- and more! -- or if they promise you that they can get you "whitelisted" anywhere but their own network, well, do you want to buy a bridge?
Important Documents for Email Marketing Firms
All firms engaged in marketing via email should read the following documents:
The Definition of "Spam"http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html
Responsible Mailing Lists -vs- Spam Lists:
http://www.spamhaus.org/mailinglists.html
Permission Pass - How to rescue your mailing list:
http://www.spamhaus.org/permissionpass.html
What is the right way to send bulk e-mail?
http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Marketing%20FAQs#214
Spam is no worse than postal junk mail, is it?
Sending postal mail costs money, both to print and to deliver, so there is a monetary threshold that keeps everyone from sending lots of it. Spam, on the other hand, costs nothing to the sender therefore there is no monetary barrier or incremental cost to deter how much spam can be sent.
There are 30,000,000 businesses in North America alone. If sending postal junk mail cost nothing either to print or to deliver and therefore each North American business could freely send you one item of junk email per month, you personally would receive 1,000,000 items of junk mail each day in your postal mailbox. Luckily, print and delivery costs prevent that ever occurring. But not so with email spam.
Very simply, spam does not scale. There is no way for a recipient to say "I will accept only 10 items of spam per day and no more" since there is no mechanism to force other senders to stop sending after the recipient's daily quota has been reached. Nor is there any mechanism to force spam senders to not send more than one spam per month to each recipient. Nor is there any mechanism to limit who can send spam to your email address. The Internet is international -- can only North American businesses send you spam? How about South American businesses? And European businesses? What about businesses in Asia or Africa, are they somehow not allowed to send spam to you as well?.
If you agree to accept spam as an advertising medium, then you also agree that every business in the world can send spam to you. As you have no way to limit who can send you spam, you are therefore agreeing to receive bulk email advertisements from a potential 200,000,000 businesses worldwide. Assuming each only sends you one spam per month you would receive 6,600,000 spams per day, meaning 4,500 spams per minute, or 150 spams per second, into your email mailbox. And many businesses would like to send more than one message per month, possibly more than one per day! So how do you solve this problem?
The obvious solution is to limit who can send bulk email advertisements to you, so that you only receive the bulk email you actually want to receive. Instead of agreeing to receive millions of unsolicited bulk emails from millions of senders, the solution is to instead opt to receive only bulk emails from specific lists you decide to subscribe to. That is what Spamhaus advocates.
BAD ADVICE: The DMA says spamming is OK!
Unfortunately the USA Direct Marketing Association wrongly advises DMA members that the sending of unsolicited bulk email is an acceptable business practice. This bad advice by the DMA has tricked many DMA members into spamming and consequentially damaged the reputations of companies who believed they were following correct advice.
Sending and delivering unsolicited bulk email is against the Terms of Business (Acceptable Use Policy, "AUP") of all Internet Service Providers (ISP) as well as being against the policies of all of the Internet's anti-spam systems. Sending unsolicited bulk email gets the sender not only blocklisted by anti-spam systems but the sender also breaks their own ISP's Terms of Business and therefore will often lose their internet access as well. The long-term damage caused to a business' reputation and to its internet connectivity by spamming is serious.
As well as being increasingly in conflict with international spam laws, the DMA's advice is in direct conflict with Spamhaus policy on legitimate bulk email, and coincides with the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) listing policy which states that anyone knowingly sending unsolicited bulk email will be listed on the SBL for spamming.
It must be stressed that this bad and irresponsible advice is given out only by the American DMA and is contrary to the correct advice of other international DMA organizations including the Australian, Canadian and European DMAs, all of which endorse opt-in policies only.
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