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7 Ways to Be Mistaken for a Spammer
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jan 31, 2007 09:10 AM
from the mispell-male-genitalia-i-dare-you dept.
from the mispell-male-genitalia-i-dare-you dept.
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."
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No room left for legitimate marketing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Damn you and your subliminal advertising.
I admit it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I admit it. (Score:5, Insightful)
"To unsubscribe, go to our website and edit your preferences with a military-grade password you either don't remeber or never actually set yourself. The 'forgot password' link might actually work, but then again probably not. Why should we care; we'll keep sending you our ads at your expense until you manage to make us stop somehow. Aren't you glad we are *legitimate* spam...I mean...'marketing email'?"
Parent
"Unsubscribe" links are harmful; don't click them. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [spamgourmet.com] 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.
Parent
Re:"Unsubscribe" links are harmful; don't click th (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Assume-deny. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Assume-deny. (Score:4, Funny)
They want to you to go to the 'checkout' page without any pesky customer service requests.
Parent
Different approachs. (Score:5, Insightful)
#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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
On a more general note, in my opinion, spam is this:
Unsolicited Bulk Email.
It doesn't matter if it is commercial. It doesn't matter if you have a business partner I once bought a chia pet from.
I did not solicit your email, and you sent it in bulk to many people. It IS spam, no matter how legitimate your business is.
Many 'legitimate' companies have been put on my spam lists because they have sent me emails when I never gave them my email address. Yes, this would be a much smaller problem i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd go a step farther... SPAM is bulk unsolicited correspondence of any kind. The keywords being bulk and unsolicited. All these damn 0% pre-approved credit card applications I get every day (probably 2-3) is not only spam, but a huge waist.
At least I can click a button to remove spam from my email inbox. =)
Cheers,
Fozzy
Re:Different approachs. (Score:5, Funny)
You aren't supposed to be eating them, silly! Just throw them out!
Parent
Send it back! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Different approachs. (Score:5, Funny)
Calling them "spam" may be true, but it's just insulting to imply that they're fat, too.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should I reply to their email with "unsubscribe" in the subject box, when not only did I not ask to receive it, but I specifically asked not to get it in the first place?
I love the SPAM button in Gmail. I also love the Spam recipes Gmail shows me when I check the SPAM folder.
Re:I admit it. (Score:5, Insightful)
also, the articly basicly just lists a number of things that mark spam as spam. IF you are doing any of those thigns you are NOT legitimate, you are spam.
not keeping up with unsubscribe? well that is then unsolisited email and it is spam.
Parent
And the solution to the problem is... (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [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
No need for marketing. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 limi
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Just imagine..."I can't believe it's not butter" would be become "I believe it's a petroleum industry by-product"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No room left for legitimate marketing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No room left for legitimate marketing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No room left for legitimate marketing. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 qui
Love of capitalism does not imply love of ads. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 no
Advertising/Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Myself, I can't stand disruptive and fraudulent advertising (what I consider spam).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's your right to advertise to me. It may be gmail's right to advertise to me, I'm getting a free service from them. It may be NBC's right to advertise to me, I watch the shows they pay for. But people advertising to my inbox, YOU have given me nothing! Why do you think you deserve any of my attention? I don't care if you're best buy, a nigerian prince, or a new startup company. If you want to advertise to me, gi
Re:No room left for legitimate marketing. (Score:4, Insightful)
P.S. I have sigs turned off
Parent
No, not really (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Mistaken??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 t
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I have a list that is mailman based, double opt-in of course and unsubscribe information at the bottom of every email (plus I'll do it manually if they're too clueless to click a link). Every now and then someone reports it as spam, because they couldn't be bothered unsubscribing or even sending a 'please unsubscribe me' email.
Heck, mailman even auto-unsubscribes after a small number of bounces, so it's not like it tries too hard...
90% of ISPs can spot the induhvidual immed
Re:Mistaken??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
That's something to remember, even the current owners promise that they won't pimp you d
Re:It's not just email! (Score:4, Informative)
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 [out-law.com]
Needless to say here we take the DPA *very* seriously.
Parent
hey, pizza hut! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Only one legitimate point (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You also have honest businesses who should know better, and still make it onto spammer lists. Ziff-Davis is a good example. They were using a set of mailers whose headers would trip off a spam filter. I could deal with that, but not their behavior. I signed up for one newsletter - I did not ask for the 20 other newsletters they thoughtfully decided to send me. It took me the better part of a week to get off of most of the mailing lists, but every time I responded to something in the one newsletter I
eMail Layout (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a real problem (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
1, 2 and 3 is spam (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Important issues come to light. (Score:5, Funny)
Spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Missing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The sound of a tiny violin... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
First poster is right, but with wrong POV (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Marketing is not "legitimate" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is patently false - I am on a couple of lists of small local companies. I signed up for these by writing my address on a physical piece of paper in the shops. One sends a newsletter every month with new products etc, another sends a newsletter every couple of months with useful articles, as well as an occasional email about a sale.
I signed up for these emails, I like getting these emails, and I could easily unsubscribe to
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My email server, my rules. Anyone who has a legitimate internet presence has access to a correctly configured mail server in a static IP block. I'm surprised you didn't run into it before, actually, because blackholes for dynamic IP blocks are very common.
You don't have to own your own netblock, you just have to have an IP in a range that isn't marked for dynamic addresses. That's what th