The only surprise in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group’s statement last week condemning email appending was that it didn’t publish one sooner.

However, MAAWG’s implication that email appending can’t be accomplished without spamming is nonsense.

Ken does have a point. I can come up with a number of scenarios where recipients give permission to have their data appended. It’s not totally impossible to append with permission. I don’t think MAAWG would argue that appending with permission is a violation of MAAWG core values.

But that’s all in theory. The fact that someone could do email appending with permission doesn’t mean they are. In fact, no one is. It’s expensive to do appending with permission and the return is low. There is a very practical reason no one is doing appending with permission: it’s not cost effective.

Let me put it another way. You can’t actually get enough people to opt-in to an appending process to pay for the cost of appending.

And that is why I am OK with MAAWG publishing a strong statement against appending without any nuance. Appending with permission is not a valid business model, so no appending service is going to offer it. I’m also convinced if someone did, somehow, come up with some magic business model that makes appending with permission cost effective that MAAWG would amend their statement.

But spending months (or years given the actual conversation) coming up with the right carve out language to accommodate non-existent business models seems a waste of time.

It is the position of MAAWG that email appending is an abusive practice. Sending email to someone who did not explicitly give informed consent for his or her email address to be used in this way is never acceptable. It will result in complaints, which only further illustrates how much end users find this practice abusive. It will result in delivery issues, largely as a result of those complaints. Legitimate marketers do not engage in email appending.

(bold in the original)

MAAWG isn’t mincing words here. They do not support sending mail without permission. They do not believe that matching an email address with a customer record constitutes permission to mail to that customer.

The mail copy and the website spends an awful lot of time talking about how their mail is accidentally blocked by ISPs and businesses.

Many legitimate businesses like emedia are finding that strict spam filters are causing some of our emails to be miss-classified as junk email even though you opted-in to subscribe to our free service.

For information and support to guarantee your ebulletins are delivered click here

I admit it, I have some bias against companies that spend time and energy pointing out how ISPs are being mean and blocking their mail. Yes, ISPs do screw up and occasionally block mail that probably shouldn’t be blocked. But, in my experience, senders who spend a lot of time focused on the blocks are usually not following best practices.

This company is not only sending mail to people who have no idea who they are and don’t remember subscribing, but they’re also violating CAN SPAM. The mail I was forwarded did not contain an opt-out link. I suppose technically it is a transactional message, but if the mail isn’t being delivered what’s the harm in putting in an opt-out link?

emedia also claims to be “an active member of Return Path’s Sender Score Certified program, the leading third party email certification program.” The IP this email came from isn’t certified and has what I consider to be a low Sender Score. Maybe this is an attempt to clean up to stay certified, that’s possible.

One thing that makes me very, very suspicious of this sender is that to sign up for the mail you need to create an account and provide a password. I have this horrible suspicion that were my friend to try and opt-out, they wouldn’t let her do it until she provided a password. This is a clear CAN SPAM violation.

Nonsense like this drives me totally batty. Their webpage looks like hundreds of other marketing webpages out there. They talk a good game. But they’re sending spam and seem to think the problem is “overly strict spam filters” rather than the fact that people they’re mailing never asked to receive their mail.

I interact with a lot of online marketers and I have a huge amount of respect for many of them. I know how difficult it can be to run a good email marketing program and that sometimes it feels like ISPs are a sender’s worst nightmare. Then I look at marketers like this and I understand why ISPs block so much “legitimate” mail. Even if most of the emediaUSA list is opt-in, some portion of it isn’t and I think it’s totally fair game to block all mail from that source.

There are so many esoteric discussions going on where people argue about frequency, list hygiene, data management, and permission. All of those are just ignoring the fact that there are a lot of marketers sending mail the recipients never opted-in to receive. Botnets might be a problem for the ISPs, just in the total volume of mail that hits their mail servers. But for the average person, it’s that non-botnet “legitimate company” spam in their inbox that is the most visible spam problem.

How do you gently educate one’s customers or employer to use permission-based marketing?

Ken published the responses in his Tuesday newsletter. For a number of reasons I didn’t participate in the conversation, but I’ve been thinking about the question a lot. How do I evangelize permission? Do I evangelize permission?

I wrote down a few of the things I’ve done to where permission has been part of the conversation in the last 14 years.

• I’ve talked with hundreds of big and small companies privately about permission and sending only opt-in email.
• I’ve publicly commented on permission to the FTC.
• I’ve participated in private discussions between spammers and anti-spammers searching for that middle ground.
• I’ve participated in public discussions on policy and delivery.
• I’ve worked with dozens of Spamhaus listees to clean up their permission practices and get them delisted.
• I’ve worked an abuse desk for a large network provider.
• I’ve consulted for some of the worst ROKSO spammers out there.
• I’ve evangelized to large companies who think their mail can’t be spam.
• I’ve worked with small entrepreneurs who just wanted to use email to talk to their customers and investors.
• I’ve worked with companies that send me email to fix some of their minor bobbles in practice.
• I’ve blogged for years on email delivery and permission.

Permission weaves its way through almost every conversation I have about email and delivery. But it’s not the sole thing I focus on when dealing with customers. What I really evangelize, rather than permission, is that a successful email marketing program is based on sending mail people want. Having permission from the recipient makes it oh so much easier to send mail those recipients want and are actively engaged in.

When working with clients to fix a delivery problem or just teach them about mail delivery, I don’t say a lot about permission. I talk more about mail people want and mail people expect and mail people are engaged with. Permission is but a small part of accomplishing all of those things. Mailers who focus solely on the technical specifics of permission “They checked the box!” or “But they gave me their email address!” often face many of the same delivery challenges as mailers who buy guaranteed opt-in lists from the broker down the street.

Mail delivery is not just about the buzzword ‘permission’. Rather it’s about a much broader, much more complex model of the relationship between email senders, ISPs, recipients and the rest of the email ecosystem. ‘Permission’ is a part of that, but just a part.

Many people, including some of the Only Influencers participants, want a very simple description of the world and a list of rules to follow and checkboxes to tick that mean they’re doing things right. But reality is much more complex than that, and more complex than you can sum up in a couple of buzzwords or checkboxes.

We don’t get much spam on Yahoo, mostly because we don’t give our email address out much. The only spam we really get is from <stockbroker website>, and that all goes to the spam folder. We use the site for checking stock quotes – it’s free, and we never see any of the spam they send.

A typical email marketer would look at that and object loudly to her use of the “S word” to describe their email – it’s mail the subscriber signed up and gave permission for, and they have an ongoing relationship with the sender, and they haven’t unsubscribed, and, and, and…

But a delivery expert will point out that none of that matters one jot. Sure, the sender has a figleaf of permission, because they convinced the recipient to “subscribe to their mailings” (even if that was via the threat of withholding a free web service if they didn’t sign up). And that does provide some legal protection.

But as far as delivering email to recipients inboxes, let alone receiving any ROI for an email campaign, it’s pretty much irrelevant. The recipient perceives the mail as spam, and describes it as such to other people – “<stockbroker company> sends spam” is not the image you want to have. The subscriber doesn’t read the email, doesn’t want the email, certainly doesn’t pull it out of the spam folder and may well be hitting the “this is spam” button for messages that end up in the inbox.

You’re certainly not getting any benefit at all from that subscriber, and their relationship to the mail you’re sending them – not opening or interacting with it, categorizing it as spam, etc – is teaching their ISPs spam filters that your mail is unwanted spam. The reputation of your domain, your content and your sending IP addresses will suffer, and your delivery rates to all your subscribers will suffer.

If you’re forcing someone to give you permission, it’s not permission-based marketing.

For some the only acceptable permission is round trip confirmation, also known as confirmed opt-in or double opt-in.

For others making a purchase constitutes permission to send mail.

For still others checking or unchecking a box on a signup page is sufficient permission.

I don’t think there is a global, over arching, single form of permission. I think context and agreement matters. I think permission is really about both sides of the transaction knowing what the transaction is. Double opt-in, single opt-in, check the box to opt-out area all valid ways to collect permission. Dishonest marketers can, and do, use all of these ways to collect email addresses.

But while dishonest marketers may adhere to all of the letters of the best practice recommendations, they purposely make the wording and explanation of check boxes and what happens when confusing. I do believe some people make the choices deliberately confusing to increase the number of addresses that have opted in. Does everyone? Of course not. But there are certainly marketers who deliberately set out to make their opt-ins as confusing as possible.

This is why I think permission is meaningless without the context of the transaction. What did the address collector tell the recipient would happen with their email address? What did the address giver understand would happen with their email address? Do these two things match? If the two perceptions agree then I am satisfied there is permission. If the expectations don’t match, then I’m not sure there is permission involved.

What are your thoughts on permission?

Sending relevant email is important. Not only do recipients expect mail to be relevant, but the ISPs often make delivery decisions on how relevant their users find your mail. Marketers that send too much irrelevant mail find themselves struggling to get inbox placement.

Permission makes sending relevant mail all that much easier. Sure, really good marketers can probably collect, purchase, beg, borrow and steal enough information to know that their unsolicited email is relevant. But how many marketers are actually that good?

My experience suggest that most marketers aren’t that good. They don’t segment their permission based lists to send relevant mail. They’re certainly not going to segment their non-permission based lists to send relevant mail.

Macy’s, for instance, decided that I would find their Bloomingdales mail relevant. I didn’t, and unsubscribed from both publications, after registering a complaint with their ESP. Had Macy’s asked about sending me Bloomies mail I wouldn’t have opted-in, but I probably wouldn’t have unsubbed from Macy’s mail, too.

So what’s your stand? Does relevance trump permission? Or does permission trump relevance? How much relevant, unsolicited mail do you get? How much irrelevant permission based mail do you get? And what drives you to unsubscribe from a permission based list?

After several conversations recently about “best practices,” I’m convinced that the term is now meaningless. It’s been bastardized in the same way that the definition of “spam” has shifted to the point that it has very different meanings to different groups of people.

I have actually had clients tell me things like “we follow all the best practices” only to tell me later in the phone call that they go out of their way to ignore opt-outs. When a company ignores opt-outs as a matter of policy and then feels safe claiming they follow all the best practices then the term is totally meaningless.

Best practices as I tend to think of them are technical implementations of commonly accepted policies. It’s how you translate intention into action.

With email marketing, though, there are very few commonly accepted policies. In fact, I’d argue that there are no commonly accepted policies. There’s not even any real consensus on whether or not permission is necessary to send email.

If you can’t even agree on the first principles, like permission, then best practices is a totally meaningless phrase. In fact, in many cases when a client tells me they follow all the best practices it tells me nothing about what they are actually doing. Instead we have to go back and establish what they’re drawing the term best practices from.

All of these things that just confirm Chad’s observation that best practices is a totally meaningless term.

Some of those folks are clients or sales prospects but some of them are actually industry colleagues that have customers sending spam. In either case, I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices and what we all mean when we talk about best practices. In conversing with various people it’s clear that the term doesn’t mean what the speakers think it means.

For me, best practice means sending mail in a way that create happy and engaged recipients. There are a lot of details wrapped up in there, but all implementation choices stem from the answer to the question “what will make our customers happy.” But a lot of marketers, email and otherwise, don’t focus on what makes their recipients or targets happy.

In fact, for many people I talk to when they say “best practice” what they really mean is “send as much mail as recipients will tolerate.” This isn’t that surprising, the advertising and marketing industries survive by pushing things as far as the target will tolerate (emphasis added).

Just as it did over-the-air, those purveyors of television advertising will push the limits of toleration in their quest for profit. There’s nothing wrong with that, but let’s understand that in so doing, we’re pushing people who can now push back.

The unwanted messages theme is the same with mass media in print. A paper with nothing but ads is called a sale paper or advertising supplement. There’s only so far you can stretch the display advertising model before people begin to complain, too. Why? Because there’s no demand for unwanted messages.

The ability of people to push back is magnified in the email space. Recipients can push back against unwanted messages directly as individuals by using the this-is-spam button in their mail clients. They can block certain senders, they can filter mail out of their inbox. But even more than that, if many recipients push back against a particular sender, the ISPs notice. Their individual pushbacks are noticed the ISP acts to block or filter mail for all their users.

Best practices aren’t just about authentication, or personalization or any of the specific actions people are thinking about when they mention best practices. The term best practices is really shorthand for “don’t send spam.” Unfortunately, there are a lot of companies that send spam and still proclaim they’re following all best practices.

Really. Spam isn’t a best practice.

In my own work with clients, I usually start with making sure all the technical issues are correct. As almost all spam filtering is score based, and the minor scores given to things like broken authentication and header issues and formatting issues can make the difference between an email that lands in the inbox and one that doesn’t get delivered.

I don’t think I’m alone in this approach, as many of my clients come to me for help with their technical settings. In some cases, though, fixing the technical problems doesn’t fix the delivery issues. No matter how much my clients tweak their settings and attempt to avoid spamfilters by avoiding FREE!! in the subject line, or changing the background, they still can’t get mail in the inbox.

Why not? Because they’re sending mail that the recipients don’t really want, for whatever reason. There are so many ways a sender can collect an email address without actually collecting consent to send mail to that recipient. Many of the “list building” strategies mentioned by a number of experts involve getting a fig leaf of permission from recipients without actually having the recipient agree to receive mail.

Is there really any difference in permission between purchasing a list of “qualified leads” and automatically adding anyone who makes a purchase at a website to marketing lists? From the recipient’s perspective they’re still getting mail they don’t want, and all the technical perfection in the world can’t overcome the negative reputation associated with spamming.

The secret to inbox delivery: don’t send mail that looks like spam. That includes not sending mail to people who have not expressly consented to receive mail.