For every 1 legit company, there are probably 100 illegit ones. DRCI
makes no bones about it on their home page:"Data Resource Consulting, (DRC) provides leads, permission based e-mail list rentals and accompanying marketing strategies to both the off-line and online direct marketing communities as well as individual companies seeking such services."Companies like Dart Mail and Cheetah Mail have much higher standards. Companies like Big Foot Interactive tend to have a mix of legit newsletters and subversive opt-in advertising that most would consider to be spam regardless of how the got the E-mail address. Companies like Experian/exactis.com seem to specialize in this low-quality subversive opt-in stuff, and then of course there's the spam houses that don't really care where the E-mail addresses came from, and they will even "rent" you a list just like the DRCI site says. I'm in the process of moving to a system where I block first, whitelist later (as recommended by Message Sniffer's Grey rulebase). Since advertising sources tend to have a lot of problems with RBL's regardless of whether or not they are legit, this seems to be a good way to do it. I've built myself a simple Web app that allows me to store information about a problematic sender in a database, and from which I export a pseudo-whitelist file (negatively weighted). This will make administration much easier, and allow me to block the 90% of the garbage that Experian sends, while allowing through the 10% that's legit on the second try. I'm not really trying to "block first" in reality, I'm just going to raise the scores of some tests like MailPolice, FiveTen Bulk, Sniffer Gray, Sniffer General and some others that I've been dropping due to such issues, but I'm not going to raise them to the point where every message will fail. Dirty sources like Big Foot Interactive and Experian will likely already fail, and the others that do pass, are susceptible to getting SpamCopped on occasion, which means they need some extra protection due to a combination of tests. I also have set up some rules for inclusion in this list. The sender much be sending relevant information to a direct subscriber, i.e. no third-party trash allowed. They must provide an easily accessible opt-out mechanism with a link and no password required, if they don't, I may consider allowing some sources through based on how I perceive the company as a whole. They must not sell addressees to third parties, and I will also exclude from consideration sources that don't practice good list management, for instance, Sprint PCS sends out a fairly low quality newsletter every month to a bunch of their subscribers, but I just found the other day that one domain was still getting these newsletters over a year after they dropped Sprint for another provider. My goal here is to not be in the business of making decisions for my customers as to what they do want and what they don't want when it comes to advertising/newsletter content. I would prefer to let them unsubscribe from such sources if they don't want it. There is some real borderline stuff, but after looking at these things for several months, some of it becomes obvious. I will let through Orbitz and Travelocity ads because it's obvious that they only to to their customers and they have a proper opt-out mechanism. Personally I find them annoying and too frequent, however some might not agree and I'd rather give them the choice. Matt Darin Cox wrote:
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