Subject: [Asrg] 7.c Mass Mailers, reliability, and lack thereof

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 16:07:16 -0500

There have been complaints by mass mailers about their emails not
reaching intended recipients.  Internet email to residential accounts is
not five-nines reliable today, never was in the past, and never will be.
Deal with it.

  The advertisers are *DEMANDING* that their spam^H^H^H^H "legitimate
commercial email" *NOT* be blocked.  This results in the more cynical
amongst us feeling that the "JamSpam" initiative might be better named
"JamSWpamDownYourThroat"

  Enough of my criticisms; have I got a better solution?  What if all
those millions of recipients *REALLY* *REALLY* *REALLY* want those
"newsletters", etc?  Personally, I think that claim is a sick joke on
par with claiming that people love to have their supper interrupted by
telemarketers.  However, I'm willing to give e-marketers the opportunity
to prove me wrong.  Let's assume, for the sake of argument, all those
people on the "Millions CDs" really *DID* want those ads.

  There is a very simple solution that would not require any
conferences, or standards, or legislation.  The email marketers could
set up their own "legitimate commercial email delivery" ISP, which they
would control, and willing "newsletter subscribers" could join that ISP.
Not only will they have the end-to-end-control necessary to guarantee
delivery of their messages to willing subscribers, but those people who
buy stock early in the new ISP will MAKE_MONEY_FAST as the stock shoots
up through the roof when millions of newsletter-starved subscribers come
crawling in on their hands and knees, begging to be allowed to join up.
The financial carnage amongst today's big ISPs will be horrendous when
people find out about all the "exciting offers" they've been missing and
abandon today's big names in droves.

  OK e-marketers, if you're really telling the truth about all your
millions of eager "double-opt-in-subscribers", this is your opportunity
to...
  - guarantee email delivery *TO WILLING RECIPIENTS ONLY*
  - and make a financial killing
  - and prove that you aren't out to JamSpamDownTheThroats of unwilling
    recipients

  I'm even willing to be there to cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony
for that ISP.  ***PUT UP OR SHUT UP***.

-- 
Walter Dnes <[email-masked]>
An infinite number of monkeys pounding away on keyboards will
eventually produce a report showing that Windows is more secure,
and has a lower TCO, than linux.
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From: Chuq Von Rospach <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 13:13:56 -0800

On Thursday, March 27, 2003, at 01:07  PM, [email-masked] wrote:

> Let's assume, for the sake of argument, all those

Yet another case of lumping legitimate e-marketing operations in with 
the spammers. No wonder nobody makes any progress on this stuff (and no 
wonder they won't talk to you about issues, walt)

As long as people carry these kinds of attitudes around, why should 
anyone be surprised that the legitimate e-marketers avoid you like the 
plague, anyway? it's not useful, not productive, and it doesn't help 
solve anything here.

---

From: Brad Templeton <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 14:08:51 -0800

> not five-nines reliable today, never was in the past, and never will be.

Hmm.  While I agree that current E-mail is not fully reliable, I would
disagree with the suggestion that it could not be made fully reliable and
should not be made so.   I don't believe that's the province of this research
group, but nor is it for us to say that his won't happen.
> amongst us feeling that the "JamSpam" initiative might be better named

We have to accept that spammers, and near-spammers will indeed put their
support for selfish reasons behind principles of reliable mail delivery,
eliminating mail blockage and many of the other principles that we value
here.   Child pornographers and holocaust deniers also give their cheering
support to our free speech efforts, however that in no way is an argument
to diminish those efforts.

There actually are a significant number of legit mails that have been
blocked by anti-spam techniques.  It's real, and it's a flaw in those techniques,
and it is to be eliminated.  One of the classic examples was a simultaneous
mailing to hundreds of Yale (IIRC) applicants telling them they had been
accepted at Yale.  Safe to say those people wanted to get that E-mail, and
that it was a serious error for the blocking software to have discarded it,
and a more serious error to have the discard not be reported to those who would
care about it.

Stories of innocent sites improperly blacklisted are legion.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 21:03:45 -0800

While I've switched careers (at least temporarily) out of the
high-tech industry, I have worked for a legitimate email marketer.
And I can tell you for a fact that there are people who *do* 
want to receive opt-in email marketing.  They want to be notified
of new homes for sale in their neighborhood, when mortgage rates
fluctuate, what new classical music CDs have come out this week,
and when airfares to Newark have dropped.  Why they want to go to
Newark is beyond me, but they want to know how to get there cheaply.

Many of these people are your Aunt Mildred-- they signed up for AOL
because it was easy to use and Bertha next door usd it.  They aren't
technically literate, and they aren't about to switch ISPs just to
be able to get their weekly Cheez-Wiz recipe fix, but they *do* want 
to get this mail.

Legit email marketers are pretty far away from the millions-of-
addresses CDs; they clients tend to get the signups from their own
websites-- "Want to know when tuna is $.25 off at your neighborhood
grocery store?  Enter your address here."  They don't always follow
anti-spam best practices, and sometimes they even screw up, but in
general, legit email marketers will try pretty damned hard not to send
mail to people who don't want it.

There has to be a solution that allows solicited commercial email to
get through (fairly) reliably, while at the same time stopping
unsolicited mail.  Lumping the two together is counter-productive.

-Patti

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From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 10:14:53 -0500

>want to receive opt-in email marketing.  They want to be notified

Isn't that the definition of "opt-in"?  Someone came and said they 
wanted to receive it?  (Whether the mailer verified that the idiot 
who entered the email address is actually the owner of the address of 
course is (unfortunately) a different issue.)

But telling company A you want to receive something is *not* the same 
as telling company B.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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From: "Alan DeKok" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 07:14:02 -0500

[email-masked] wrote:
> addresses CDs ...  They don't always follow anti-spam best
> practices, and sometimes they even screw up, but in general, legit
> email marketers will try pretty damned hard not to send mail to
> people who don't want it.

  The 'legitimaate' emails would appear to satisfy the following
criteria:

 a) send a lot of email
 b) are willing to publicly state who they are, and why
    they're sending the email
 c) are willing to remove people from their lists
 d) try to have only 'opt-in' lists

  The amount of mail from bulk emailers who *don't* satisfy all of
those criteria is probably a thousand, to a million times worse than
the amount of mail from bulk emailers who do satisfy those criteria.

  Spam solutions should affect 'legitimate' bulk emailers as little as
possible.  But if we can agree on that, the "problem" of email from
bulk emailers is so small that it's irrelevant to the discussion about
spam.

  Alan DeKok.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 09:31:59 -0800

>course is (unfortunately) a different issue.)

Yes, it is.  In an ideal (i.e. spam-free) world, I could just go off
to my hairdresser's website, slap my address in where it says "let me
know when you start using a new brand of shampoo", and that would be it.

Sure, there would occasionally be abuse-- someone could get pissed
at you and slam your name onto two dozen mailing lists, for example.
But in this dream spamn-free world that would only be a mild annoyance,
since you could just unsubscribe and be done with it.

The start of this thread was someone who lumped in genuine opt-in
marketing email with millions-of-addresses-on-CD spammers.  I wanted
to show that they are two very different things.

>But telling company A you want to receive something is *not* the same 

That depends upon who companies A and B are.

If company A is the abovementioned hairdresser, and company B provides
the actual mechanics of sending out the new-shampoo mail, then I think
it is the same thing.  This assumes, of course, that company B is
providing that service honestly and carefully, and doesn't use my
address for anything other than sending mail from my hairdresser.
(This is the kind of company I worked for.)

How about the next tier?  "We're providing you with this free service.
In exchange, you agree to let some of our buddies send you ads."  Can
that be workable?  While that email is generally less interesting to
the recipient, I think it can also be workable if it's done well.

In this case, the address would either need to be kept in-house, or
passed off to one responsible vendor who serves as an agent.  This
allows for a reliable single-point-of-unsubscribe mechanism for all
mail sent as a result of your affiliation with free-service-provider.
You definitely don't want the address passed off to multiple entities,
since turning off the flow would then be significantly more difficult.

I'm making some assumptions about the email vendors in all of this--
they promptly and reliably honor unsubscribe requests, carefully
protect the privacy and security of mailing lists, etc.  But there
*are* email vendors like that out there-- I worked for one.  (You would
not believe how many technical hoops I jumped through to ensure that
every single unsubscribe request was honored during every conceivable
flavor of system downtime.)  

They also impose some stringent restrictions on their clients about how
addresses are acquired and managed, to avoid sending mail to people who
don't want it.  I'll admit that most vendors are probably not quite as
good about this as they should be, but they *are* trying.

These vendors are as far from make-money-fast-with-a-bigger-penis-and-
hot-lolitas-and-viagra-to-15-million-addresses as you can get.

-Patti

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 14:53:10 -0500

>the recipient, I think it can also be workable if it's done well.

Does anyone do that well?  (Just idly curious.)
I got burned by Jackpot.com a little over a year ago.  Someone signed 
up on their web site using my email address.  Within a matter of 
minutes Jackpot had given my email address to a dozen affiliates who 
promptly started a barrage of email advertisements.  The process was 
*not* reversible.  Jackpot had no way to say, "Oops, we take that 
address back."  I had to fight it out which each individual 
affiliate.  My only payment for this pain?  One of the affiliates 
lost their ISP account as a result.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 22:29:00 -0700 (MST)

> From: "Alan DeKok" <[email-masked]>

> ...
> ...

Would most Internet push advertising professionals consider Topica
legitimate?  I suspect so, in part because Topica uses the Habeas mark
for some of their bulk mail.

As far as I can tell Topica does not really satisfy (c)--at least not
permanently. They certainly do not satisfy (d) for that part of their
bulk mail that does not carry the Habeas mark.  (I think I've fairly
recent Topica spam in my logs that does not carry the Habeas mark.)

> bulk emailers is so small that it's irrelevant to the discussion about

Yes, but as far as I can tell, there are no major bulk mailers that
satisfy all four of your criteria.  Dell Computers is a poster child
for this fact of life.  Years after some owners of accounts @rhyolite.com
dealt with Dell, opted-out of mail about special offers, and eventually
cancelled their @rhyolite.com accounts, Dell started sending those
accounts monthly "newsletters" about wonderfully cheap offers.

Another example is Qwest.  Every few weeks an account I created
especially and gave Qwest repair a couple years ago is sent spam by
"Qwest partners" flogging business data services.  This drivel started
about 18 months after the need for that account.

I bet that each of the Fortune 5000 is guilty of this sort of thing.

I'm not pointing this out to criticize the Qwest, Dell or any other
marketing or sales professionals including even Topica, but only to
establish a fact of life and human nature that contradicts assumptions
or claims common in some areas.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]
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---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 04:03:31 -0500

>recent Topica spam in my logs that does not carry the Habeas mark.)

Yes.  The Habeas use on Topica is either new, or restricted to 
confirmed-opt-in lists (which I believe is a Habeas requirement). 
I've had more than a few Topica lists show up in my inbox unwanted. 
In fact, my guess is that the reason Topica is currently silently 
dropping all email from somewhere.com is that they decided that 
instead of fixing their lists, they'd just remove the complainer.

---

From: "Alan DeKok" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 21:09:11 -0500

Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]> wrote:
> satisfy all four of your criteria.

  Then they have an opportunity to learn how to sell to potential
customers in a friendly manner.

> or claims common in some areas.

  So my statement about "legitimate" bulk emailers doesn't include
Fortune 500 companies.  Too bad for them.  Others have noted corporate
opposition to anti-spam laws, which says to me that those corporations
are knowingly and intentionally engaging in unfriendly and soon-to-be
illegal behaviour.

  ASRG should be about solving the spam problem, not about punishing
Ralsky while Fortune 500 companies do the same thing.

  Alan DeKok.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 23:22:30 -0500

On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 09:31:59AM -0800, [email-masked] wrote

> to show that they are two very different things.

  I started the thread, and no, I did *NOT* lump in "genuine opt-in
marketing email".  I'm talking about "opt-out marketing email", which up
til now has meant saying "No, no, a thousand times no".  I wouldn't mind
a one-shot "global opt-out" that really worked, but that seems to be a
tooth-fairy-land idea.