Unsolicited Bulk Emailers are the most obvious contributors to email delivery problems. Their actions negatively impact the Internet on several levels. Each email that is sent, whether delivered or not, takes up processing time on one or more servers. This time is paid for in real dollars by domain hosts and email servers along the entire path of the email delivery cycle. Time spent dealing with spam email result in hours of lost productivity.
There are two types of spammers; those that deliberately want to damage a particular mail server by flooding it with traffic, and those that hope to cash in on someone buying whatever it is they are selling.
The first type of spammer is identified by the goofy messages they send. The subject lines do not make sense and they are obviously spam messages that most people would not read. People who leave their message preview pane on in their browser may see something offensive, or inadvertantly verify their email address through a tracking image, but they will not likely purchase anything from an email like that.
The second type of spam message is a little more sophisticated. They look like legitmate emails, and actutally offer products that many people want. Many of these spam email messages are backed by real companies trying to sell their products or services. The thing that makes the messages spam, or unsolicieted bulk email, is the fact that the recipient never asked for the email, nor consented to receive the email, explicitly or implicitly, the emails just came.
Companies who engage spammers to send UBE on their behalf should be held as accountable as the party actually sending the message. Anti-spam efforts need to focus on drying up the funds that fuel spam behavior if they want to solve the spam problem. End users also have a responsibility to recognize and refrain from buying products sent via spam email messages.
Novice Email Marketers
While not intentionally sending UBE, many novice email marketers engage in spam without even knowing it. As mentioned previously, UBE means unsolicited bulk email and to be considered spam, it must contain both the element of being unsolicited and bulk.
Unsolicited means that the email message was not asked for by the recipient. In many instances your email address is harvested off of the Internet, or guessed at through a dictionary or phonebook attack. Novice marketers who purchase a list from a list broker may or may not end up with a list of emails obtained properly. Even if the list is grown natually, the novice fails to correctly obtatin consent to send email messages.
Bulk email messages are sent en masse to several email addresses at a time. There are many ways to send a message to an entire list of addresses, some are more sophisticated than others. Basic email clients like Outlook allow users to send email using a carbon copy or blind carbon copy to everybody found in the address book. This of course is how many people receive messages from friends and family members.
Consent to receive emails is one of the major points of discussion in the email marketing community. If someone gives you an email address, it does not necessarily mean that they expect you, or want you to email them. The CAN-SPAM act of 2003 failed to address the issue of consent and allows marketers who have access to an email address to send an initial UBE as long as an opt out option is provided.
Some people think that if someone does not opt out, they are implying consent, or opting to receive the message; in the early days of the Internet they may have had a point. Thanks again to spammers, the recipient avoids the opt out option because it can verify to the email harvester that the email address is valid. Legitimate email marketers need to follow a higher standard in obtaining consent.
Failure to adopt best practices
Many email marketers fail to adopt email marketing best practices when sending email to their recipients. Even if email addresses are obtained through explicit consent, and the marketer comply with the CAN-SPAM act, the legitimate email marketer can easily be lumped in with spammers unless they adopt email marketing best practices.
Best practices include.
- Obtaining confirmed consent through a subscription confirmation process
- Immediately honoring unsubscribe requests
- Maintaining a clean email address list that is free of dead or erroneous email addresses
- Removing unresponsive email addresses from the list
- Clearly identifying from where the email is sent
- Adopting DKIM, SPF and other technologies
- Participating in discussions that drive the email marketing industry
The only way for legitimate email marketers to continue to take advantage of all that email marketing offers is to continually improve the way email marketing is done. An effective solution to spam is still in the future.
Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting
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