Tara- Thanks for writing me off-list. I was composing this reply when I saw your message the list come in.
Email marketing is a HARD business to be in thanks to spammers that play by their own rules and the resulting necessity of confirmed-opt-in, which is often a show-stopper for the business (too many lost leads). My own proposal to fixing this is to bring back Blue Security's do-not-email list, which is to say a freely available index of secure hashes representing email addresses that have opted out of bulk email. (Recall that the controversial aspect of Blue Security's methods is what they did to violators, which I'm not touching here.) Armed with such a Do-Not-Email registry (DNE), mass-mailing lists can be scrubbed clean. An address on the DNE can still subscribe to a bulk list via confirmed-opt-in* while an address NOT on the DNE is subject to the bulk mailer's own self-regulating terms (single-opt-in, opt-out, etc). On-the-level companies like Constant Contact would of course never allow their customers the option of using opt-out for bulk mailings. The best part about the DNE list is the user-protection it affords; supplying a hash of your email address prevents abuse, and the hash list can (*should*!) be shared between bulk mail relayers. Plus, you can hash anything ... phone numbers, email addresses, email domains (format like: "@example.com"), XMPP/Jabber nicks, AOL nicks (format like XMPP: "n...@oscar.aol.com"), etc. * Confirmed-opt-in requests sent to DNE members must be limited in frequency or else the whole spirit is defeated. Why should an email marketing company be the one to implement this? It would garner customers interested in responsible bulk mailers and it would set a golden standard while risking nothing. I recently wrote: > They disregard this, failing to clean up their lists --which is odd > because I thought mass-emailing software was supposed to interpret > consecutive bounces as unsubscribe requests-- and failing to force > their customers to maintain their own lists (let alone shut down a > customer for a grossly unmaintained list), and then I get mail from > them again once the AWL swing has been worn down by HostKarma W et al. I'm surprised that the bounces from my servers aren't enough to auto-unsubscribe my users. Also, any non-bounced messages that come to my users (well, the ones that they then report to me) get reported to SpamCop.net, which forwards them on to the network admins at CC. I suppose it's possible that your customer base is large enough that there aren't any repeat offenders and that each case is unique ... digging through my archives, I don't see more than 2x of any message from a CC customer.
