I'm a little late jumping on board here.
At 11:31 PM 2/10/2000 -0800, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>>** Sometime around 16:00 -0800 02/08/2000, Ronald F. Guilmette sent us:
>>This is endemic of mailing lists and list owners, Ron, and has
>>nothing to do with Topica, per se.
>
>That's bull.
No, it's not. Our co. hosts/manages well over 1,000 lists for
clients now. We tried for a short-time to require all new lists
with us to reconfirm subscriptions. What happened was two things -
first, list owners became very irritated - a small fraction of
subscribers would confirm. A lot of them don't understand
the process. Second, our sign-up rate for new customers dropped.
So we went back to what we did previously - require a new list
owner to send a message out after the list was transferring giving
the equivalent of "we've moved" message. We've received less than
1 complaint for every 100,000 subscribers transferred to us.
>OK smart ass. Simple question: If the spammer COULD HAVE just used his
>own majordomo, then why didn't he? Why did he go to all of the trouble
>to have Topica do his spamming for him?
>
>Maybe when you manage to puzzle that out, you will figure out why I have
>blacklisted Topica locally.
You may as well blacklist our servers and those of 99.9% of other
list hosting services as well because it's likely we've all had one
or more problem cases slip through the cracks.
Unless you're dealing on a very small scale, it's impossible to
have structure in place to avoid problems 100%. It may not even
be the list hosting service itself, but the one the list owner
was using previously. Case in point - we've had a number of
lists transferred over to us from other services where the owner
or employee at the other service gave the list owner an old
version of their list (i.e.with people not removed who should
have been and vice versa). End result? Spam complaints. Who is
it at fault here?
Doing things like looking at a list owner's web site to make
sure they have a legitimate business isn't always a sign. Our
biggest problems with "educating" list owners about what is
spam and what is not spam come from larger companies rather
than smaller ones.
---------------------------------------------------------
Sharon Tucci
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ListHost.net
Sling Shot Media, LLC 1-613-933-5133
E-Mail List Hosting and Marketing SpeciaLists
