opt-out

Jennifer Nespola Lantz’s recent post about Gmail potentially offering political senders a fast pass method to the inbox has gotten me thinking about the spam fight we went through back in the olden times. Before CAN-SPAM, domain reputation and deliverability best practices. There was a time back in those bad old days when the marketing industry mega-group Direct Marketing Association tried to convince the world that opt-out was the best path for email marketing. The arguments as to why this absolutely horseshit plan was supposed to be okay varied; free speech, growth of the economy, support for small businesses, whatever. Everybody should be allowed the chance to hit your inbox at least once, they said; and then you could just tell the sender; each sender, individually, to stop emailing you. They loved touting two things. First was an “opt-out registry” service called e-MPS. Smart netizens knew that allowing this to proceed would

Today’s guest post comes from my colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz, VP of Industry Relations and Deliverability at Kickbox, keeping us updated on a potentially upcoming Gmail spam filtering process change that is likely to have a great impact upon all of us. Take it away, Jen!On June 28th, I saw a news article by Axios reporting that “Google moves to keep campaign messages out of spam.” At first glance I was very surprised about the statement knowing all Gmail does to protect users and how hands off they tend to be (outside of the machines doing their magic.) What I originally defined as campaign messages was coming from a too in-the-weeds mental dictionary about email production. I always coined campaigns as a singular email marketing effort. And then I read it…”Google has asked the Federal Election Commission to green light a program that could keep campaign emails from ending up