http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3610096

All that aside, this is your chance to talk about how the button might be improved. People who run feedback loops read this blog.

The suggestion I hear most often is “give the user more choices,” yet I’ve seen studies showing that if a user has to click 2-3 times to report spam or once to hit delete, they’ll just hit delete — and then nobody gets any useful feedback.

Do you have any new ideas, or just a vague dislike of the current paradigm?

Because most people who works on anti-spam don’t – or at least they act like they don’t.

BTW, my concern really isn’t about making life easier for marketers. My concern is the end-user. I’m not a marketer, I’m a sysadmin, and I want email to be useful. Sadly, too many anti-spam people are so deep in the war that they’ve utterly forgotten the reason they’re fighting in the first place.

Secondarily I work for a given company, and that company wants their email to be delivered. More importantly, their customers want their email delivered. I like the idea of the TIS button, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, there seems to be an unwillingness on the part of most anti-spammers to even admit this, let alone engage in discussions on how we make it better.

Right now I work for Return Path, directly on Sender Score, and I can tell you that we also know complaints aren’t a perfect stand-alone measure. Why do you keep assuming that nobody who works on anti-spam technology knows this?

What would you like to see changed in the external information? Try to consider it from the user’s and ISP’s point of view, not merely what would make life easier for marketers.

Second, these complaint numbers are fed to other organizations, and are used to determine how “good” of a sender you are. So if you just let the customers keep hitting that button as a means to make the email go away, then it impacts your reputation as a sender.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do – we’ve opted to simply refuse to send more email to customers before, and told them to lump it to avoid their constant complaints. But that’s not a GOOD solution.

What would be good would be if ISPs would be willing to admit that this is not a perfect system (in real terms) and start looking at how they can better handle this not just in now they use the data internally, but how they provide it externally.

All you receive is the raw complaint, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any other processing going on. And if ISPs can apply smarter processing, so can you — because you know way more about how that subscriber has interacted with your offerings than anyone else.