DMA to Control Spam by DMA Members 204
SiliconLawyer writes: "The Direct Marketing Association, the major U.S. tradegroup for companies using direct marketing techniques, will reportedly issue guidelines for how its members may and may not use e-mail as a marketing tool. Hopefully, this will influence other marketers toward more responsible use of e-mail. Details are on CNET here."
Re:Self-Moderation (Score:2, Interesting)
It's easier to filter nice spam
DMA members aren't the real problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
DMA member Amazon.com said such rules are already in practice at the online retailer. Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith said the company gives customers a myriad of choices related to receiving company communications.
"It sounds like we currently comply with all these rules already," she said.
Generally speaking, I bet most DMA members already have an acceptable spam policy - that, or a policy that needs only minor tweaking to make it policy-compliant.
Re:oh..kay (Score:3, Interesting)
"SPAM"(tm) in all caps is a trademark of Hormel, who has good humor and grace [spam.com] regarding the term used for bulk-email.
Marketing People: Spam Works (Score:5, Interesting)
I used the simple expedient of repeating the reasons against spam over and over again until they began to sink in. I even threatened legal action... ie: I told them that people were starting to successfully prosecute spammers for big money.
Even than, I had to answer the question... "Why would this be illegal? I get this kind of thing all the time."
The sad thing was, until I finally convinced the executive VP to bring the hammer down on the project, I was forced to compose graphical HTML-ized spam emails. Thank god they never saw the light of day.
Re:Yeah Right -- my solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if the DMA are honest, their service can still be used to get good addresses. Consider the following scheme:
- Sign up with e-mps.org for $100.
- Get one of these 25,000,000 email address CDs
- Filter it through e-mps.org
- Diff the filtered results against the unfiltered input.
- Send out spam to the difference list.
This gives you a list of live addresses -- ones which get less spam than average, and hence which are more likely to read your tasty marketing message.Great service guys!
The DMA should require digitally signed spam (Score:2, Interesting)
I believe this is the only way we'll ever be able to get the control mechanisms into place that will start reeling in the ever increasing abuse of the Net... accountability.
Ultimately I would hope that most email servers will begin putting into place policies that reject unsigned mail...
Anyone else agree with me?
Why was this story posted? (Score:4, Interesting)
Who is SiliconLawyer anyway? Well, well, well, wouldn't you know, he's selling something on his website.
Re:DMA not really the problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Several years ago, when Canter & Segal (the "green card lawyers" who broke the ice for spammers) were abusing the internet, the DMA announced that they would be creating a "global opt out list". Supposedly, you'd add your address to the list, and no DMA member would ever spam you.
Except it didn't work. Many people at news.admin.net-abuse.email decided to test this list. They created virgin e-mail accounts and submitted the addresses to the DMA opt-out list. Within hours, the accounts were spammed. Since the addresses were never used anywhere other than the DMA list, it became obvious that either the DMA was spamming from that list, or they were making it available to spammers.
If they think I'm going to trust them this time around, they're crazy.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.