Charles Gregory wrote:
On Fri, 4 Dec 2009, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
That wouldn't ever happen because the whole point of the CAN-SPAM
act is to allow the spammers to send out the "first" mail. Direct
e-mail mailers just setup fake company after fake company, so they can
repeatedly spam the "first time" over and over again.
Well, if a company wants to sell a 'reputation', then it has to have
more behind it than letting in 'first time' companies. any registration
process should involve a clear investigation of whether a business is
merely a 'front' for a spammer. Shouldn't be too hard to spot.
Who exactly are those mailers? Just curious since I've never in my
life seen an unsolicited commercial e-mail from a list that I never
opted in on in the first place, that I "wanted"
What are you asking? Obviously 'unsolicited' is NOT 'wanted', so
therefore by using the word 'wanted' I am by definition meaning
*solicited*. That means somone ASKED for the mail. REQUESTED it via an
opt-in mechanism, with confirmation.
I will then have to REPEAT that this will NEVER fly. The devil is in
the details, here.
If you look at return path they aren't talking about opt-in mailing
lists because that's NOT what they are whitelisting. They are
whitelisting "permission-based" e-mail.
What this means is for example I go to Redbox to rent a DVD, which
requires me to put in my e-mail address, and the
rental process has some boilerplate in it that in the small print
says I will get e-mails from redbox.
It does NOT mean that I deliberately e-mailed redbox to get on their
list, then responded in the affirmative to a confirmation mail. THAT
is a true "opt-in" Companies that do their mailing list that way, and
there's many that do, don't need what a whitelist service provides
because since the user was looking for a confirmation, they are going to
know that when it doesn't come that it got in their spam folder, so they
are going to look in there, pull it out, and whitelist the sender in
their private whitelists.
The companies that need a whitelist service are the ones like Redbox who
are gathering e-mail addresses as part of some other function then using
them to market. They need Habeas and friends because since the user who
supplied them with their e-mail address didn't bother to read the fine
print the company's "first" mail is going to be unexpected, as a result
it will normally go into the users spam folder and never be seen and
the user will never pull it out and put it in their own personal whitelist.
Companies that apply for habeas
accreditation send
material that has similar *content* to spam (buzzwords like percentages
off and the like) that might make a spam filter *mistake* their ad for
an unsolicited spam, but which should NOT be blocked because the
recipients HAVE requested and WANT the mail. It is SOLICITED.
No, the recipients HAVE NOT explicitly requested an opt-in, they have
merely NOT explicitly requested to opt-out when they provided their
e-mail address for some other reason.
And yes, people *do* request notices of weekly specials at their
computer store, and ads for the next event at the colliseum. There is a
lot of legitimate e-mail advertising. None of it is (should be)
'unsolicited'.
Wrong.
People fall into a bell-curve on this issue.
There's a small number of consumers who go out of their way to sign
up for all of the e-mail lists run by all the companies they buy from.
There's a small number who go out of their way to unsubscribe from
all the e-mail lists run by all the companies they buy from.
But the majority don't care one way or another. They won't go out
of their way to sign up for notices from the vendors they buy from,
but if that vendor signs them up, they won't go out of their way
to unsubscribe.
What's happened in the "commercial spamming" business is that the
spammers have figured this out, and managed to convince the legitimate
companies out there that if their customer doesn't object if they
start sending advertising e-mails to them, that the customer has "given
permission to be spammed" So those companies create flimsy pretexts to
obtain e-mail addresses from customers that are supposedly for other
reasons than spamming them, and then they put in the fine print during
that obtaining process a check box to uncheck being on the spam list,
and the customers in the middle of the bell curve don't go out of
their way to uncheck it and then Habeas considers this as "having
obtained permission to spam" for that customer. That's why Habeas
customers need a whitelist in the first place - because they are
adopting a point of view of what spam is that is contrary to what
most users hold.
Ted
