rant

Roger Ebert, in addition to having been one of the best movie reviewers out there, is known to me, and to many other spam fighters out there, for having coined “The Boulder Pledge” way back in 1996. The Boulder Pledge is as follows: “Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.” In other words, if you don’t like spam, make sure you don’t buy things from spam, to help minimize the chances of a spammer’s success.  Bill Weinman explains more context around the Boulder Pledge here, and shares Roger’s original column promoting the pledge, from way back in the day. Enjoy.

Lo! A different guy just popped up in my Linkedin feed to say that cold leads are cool, because they’re not illegal. (I’ve heard it before.) And for a bonus, he wants to argue about whether or not cold lead emails truly are “spam” — he says no. That’s fine, everybody’s free to have their own take, but if you’re loading my email address into an automation tool to send me an email, and I didn’t give affirmative consent to indicate my desire to receive that email, it’s spam. The law literally says that you have to label your mail as an unsolicited advertisement if you don’t have that consent. It’s not new, it’s not groundbreaking, it’s just the basic tenet of permission marketing via email. But, fine. “That’s my opinion,” even though it’s what the law says. And it’s not “just” my opinion. I think it’s observably unwanted and

I realize that talking about ISP feedback loops can just lead to a lot of blank stares from folks. Not because they’re stupid, by any means. But because for the most part, FBLs are such a basic, foundational part of an email sending platform, and most of those platforms long ago “just dealt with it” — meaning dealt with the set up and management of feedback loops many years ago (almost 20 years, in some cases), that a lot of marketers haven’t ever been required to set up or manage feedback loops themselves. Indeed, some modern email sending or relay platforms just manage the feedback loop stuff for you, automatically, suppressing complainers and generating reporting. So some newer platform maintainers may not have ever even set up and managed ISP feedback loops.Question number one: If nobody really knows about or remembers this, and if new platforms perhaps don’t even bother

That screenshot above is from an email message that I received recently. I get a lot of wacky emails, but this one takes it to a whole new level. This person did not research his target very well, and I find the content to be borderline deceptive. They are careful to say “I have results about” not “I see that you’re having trouble” to sort of hedge the bet, as if to say “I have information about your spam folder percentage” only to find out that the percentage is zero, and to be met with the defense “but zero is a percent.”This is silly. And I share this silliness not to name and shame (note that I have not shared the sender’s last name or company), but to point out that you can’t always trust everything that people tell you. In this case, I run my own dedicated MTA, with

A few weeks ago, a particular consulting discussion with a potential client ended up not working out — cold leads and purchased lists, which is not really something a deliverability consultant can help with, without a complete 180-degree turn around in practices. Not everybody’s willing to do that.”You can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink,” as the old saying goes. I can only help when my advice is desired and the other person is interested in accepting that advice. And I can’t force it; my advice goes only where it is welcome and wanted.So, life goes on and we move on to the next one. Oh, well. I understand where people are coming from, and that they sometimes face challenges that I don’t face. I hope they’ll eventually come around and want to work within a best practices framework, but for me to try to

The other day, I talked about the spam seemingly sent by a local aldermanic campaign here in Chicago. When I talked about this spam on Facebook, one of the folks pushing back attempted to lead me down an existential rabbit hole based on the theory that we just can’t know whether or not a given email message is spam. That it is literally impossible to know with absolute certainty whether or not a single email message is unsolicited. Which is yet another one of those (possibly) correct but (definitely) not very useful kind of responses. Let’s break it down.First, let’s get this out of the way. Yes, it’s absolutely true that there is no “this message is unsolicited” flag or email header in an email message, allowing anyone, at a glance, to immediately know, whether or not a given email message is spam or not.The recipient has a pretty good

Do you receive political spam? Political spam happens in the US, seemingly regardless of party, but it is not something universally engaged in, nor do I think that it is something broadly welcomed, even if some tolerate it.My own personal experience is varied. Back in my Miami Beach days, I dared to sign up for local government LISTSERVs to get warnings about hurricanes (when should we leave town?) and notifications of upcoming events in the area where I lived (where’s the live jazz?). A number of unscrupulous folks seem to have obtained my email address from those signups via FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and then added me to lists for their various candidacies. I vigorously reported all of those unsolicited messages, knowing that most best practice-abiding email sending platforms do not intend to allow lists to be built in this way, and specific mail stopped. Sometimes an overzealous candidate

You’ve seen the advice: “Just avoid these 18 spam trigger words and always get to the inbox!” I’ve been doing this a long time and somebody new pops up with guidance like this a few times a year, and it’s just absolute bullshit, and it’s been bullshit for years.Spam filters don’t work that way. They are not so simplistic that just a word or two from a static list are going to tank your inbox placement.Content does matter, to some degree, yes. Meaning that yes, what you say or include in your email messages can have an impact on inbox placement. But as far as ranking how important content is, it is third, usually a distant third place, behind IP and domain sending reputation.Don’t believe me? Here’s Magan Le from Litmus with “Why spam trigger words are a thing of the past,” where she sums it up nicely.Truth be told

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