At 01:13 AM 7/13/01 +0800, James Lick wrote:
<SNIP>
>If you do have non-confirm mailing lists, now might be a good time to
>move to confirmation though, as non-confirm mailing lists may be as
>unacceptable as open relays are now within the next couple of years.
Thanks for explaining all of this James.
I do have a concern about your last comment --- this is what I have
been hearing for the past few years now. Personally, I think that
if a provider has good policies in place, the risks are quite minimal
for potential abuse. We have had one complaint that would not have
occured if we required double opt in - and we now provide delivery to
an estimated 13.5 million email addresses. (We do require that
clients using our service who do not use double opt in have a welcome
message generated automatically upon subscription.)
We have worked with clients on all different levels to try and
improve the response rates using double opt-in. Without fail, no
matter what measures are taken, what wording of instructions, what
methods of confirming their subscription, we've seen an average of
25% of consumer oriented lists not get confirmed, 30% for non-tech
business and 15-20% for tech and business. That's a significant
portion of subscribers to lose.
I think in cases of purely commercial lists (i.e. opt-in lists
as opposed to newsletters and discussion lists) or where a third
party is generating subscribers, double opt-in is warranted. But
outside of that, we hear more complaints from end users for the
lists that we host. We get anywhere from 1-5 people a week who
call or email us about lists they are having "difficulty" confirming
subscriptions to and questioning what a "stupid" procedure it is.
Most months, this is 4 to 20 times the number of spam complaints
we get :)
Sharon Tucci
http://www.ListHost.net
