One factor that is continually repeated is the size of the company. I’ve even seen a couple people suggest that corporate net worth should be included in the reputation calculation.

The problem with this suggestion is that just because a company is big or has a high net worth or is on the Fortune500 doesn’t mean that the mail they send isn’t spam. I’ve certainly received spam from large, name brand companies (and organizations). I’ve also consulted with a number of those companies who bought or appended a list and then had to deal with the fallout from a Spamhaus listing or upstream disconnection.

Sure, there is a certain logic to company size and prominence being a part of a reputation calculation. For instance, my experience suggests consumers who recognize a brand are less likely to treat mail as “spam” even if they didn’t sign up for the mail in the first place. Certainly there are large brands (Kraft, FTDDirect, 1-800-Flowers, OfficeDepot) that have been caught sending mail to people who never opted in to their lists.

Many people don’t realize that company size and prominence are already factored into the reputation scores. No ISPs don’t look at a mail and, if it’s authenticated, add in a little positive because it’s part of a giant, name brand company. Rather, the recipients change how they interact with the mail. Even recipients who didn’t sign for mail from Office Depot may click through and purchase from an offer. Some recipients recognizing the brand will hit delete instead of “this is spam.”

All of these things mean that big brands have recognition that takes into account that they are prominent brands. Elaborate processes and extra reputation points given to big brands don’t need to happen, they’re already an innate part of the system.

Some people think FBLs are the best thing since sliced bread and can’t figure out why more ISPs don’t offer them. These people use use the data to clean addresses off their lists, lower complaints and send better mail. They use the complaints as a data source to help them send mail their recipients want. Too many recipients opted out on a particular offer? Clearly there is a problem with the offer or the segmentation or something.

Other people, though, think the existence of “this is spam” buttons and FBLs is horrible.  They call people who click “this is spam” terrorists or anti-commerce-net-nazis. They want to be able to dispute every click of the button. They think that too many ISPs offer this is spam buttons and too many ESPs and network providers pay way to much attention to complaints. The argue ISPs should remove these buttons and stop paying attention to what recipients think.

Sadly, I’m not actually making up the terminology in the last paragraph. There really are who think that the problem isn’t with the mail that they’re sending but that the recipients can actually express an opinion about it and the ISPs listen to those opinions. “Terrorists” and “Nazis” are the least of the things they have called people who complain about their mail.

One of the senior engineers at Cloudmark recently posted an article talking about FBLs and “this is spam” buttons. I think it’s a useful article to read as it explains what value FBLs play in helping spam filters become more accurate.

We have found over time that the most effective systems are those that learn to classify undesirable content based on feedback from users. The user is truly the best judge of what is and isn’t spam. The faster that consistent feedback becomes available, the sooner a filter can be re-trained to detect and respond to new attacks.

Spam filters are not there to stymie senders, their real job is to protect recipients. Faster adapting filters may seem like a bad thing, but they adapt in both directions. Send good mail that people want and it gets through. Send bad mail that people complain about and filters quickly adapt to block it.

Certainly, the “This is not spam” action – moving an email from the spam folder to the inbox, or clicking the “not spam” button in a web mail’s interface, is a strong positive reputational action. Some webmail providers use this data to decide which bulked senders deserve being let out of the penalty box – which should have their mail once again delivered to the inbox.

A client recently theorized that a great solution to their delivery problems would be to do this “en masse.” Sign up for hundreds or thousands of webmail accounts, send my mail to them, and click on the ”not spam” button for each of my own emails. That’ll greatly improve my sending reputation, right?

NO! ISPs have already thought of this. They watch for this. They’re really good at picking up on things like this. I know for a fact that Yahoo and Hotmail and AOL notice stuff like this, and I strongly suspect other webmail providers notice it as well.

What happens when Yahoo or Hotmail pick up on this type of unwanted activity? Well, if it’s at Yahoo, they’re likely to block all mail from you, 100%, forever. I’ve seen it happen more than once. Yahoo might even identify all of your netblocks, ones beyond the ones sending today’s mail or originating today’s activity. And good luck trying to convince them that you’re not a spammer – you have a better chance of winning the lottery two weeks in a row.

As for Hotmail – what would Hotmail do? Ask Boris Mizhen. Microsoft is currently suing him, alleging that he and/or his agents or associates engaged in this very practice.

The only thing I could think of is the poor woman who’s been gone for a week on vacation and is selecting large swathes of her mailbox and hitting “this is spam.”

She then gets mailbombed by her ISP with confirmation messages.

She then selects all the confirmation messages and reports those as spam.

Repeat until something breaks or she collapses sobbing in the corner because she can’t get all the crap out of her mailbox!!!

Asking users to confirm each spam report, either by an email or adding a second popup box is extremely user unfriendly. Users will demand a “confirm all” button, and never read the confirmation anyway.

My work account gets very little spam in the folder I use as my inbox. I’m not even sure exactly why this is, but it’s true. One of the exceptions is a psychic (no, really) who has a copy of one of my work email addresses and she regularly spams me offering her spiritual guidance and the opportunity to buy her stuff in order to make peace within my world.  I’ve received these before, usually I just delete them and move on.

Occasionally, though, I long for the ease of a “this is spam” button. Just to be able to hit a single button, no work, no effort and know that I have registered my frustration with a spammer. Today was one of those days. I really don’t want this psychic spam in my mailbox. It seems reasonably professionally done, though, so I check the headers to see if it’s being send from any ESP I know and if it’s worth my time to send in a “hey, didn’t sign up for this, and no, I didn’t forget, either” email.

I visited the website belonging to the domain sending the mail.

This is OnLetterhead

This domain points to OnLetterhead, a branded email and e-newsletter solution. You may have received an email which pointed you to this page. If you prefer not to receieve anymore emails from the sender, you may submit a request via email to our abuse department: support@onletterhead.com.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

That tells me all I need to know about sending in a notice. At best they’ll unsubscribe me. But I suspect  they’ll screw that up and I will still get their mail. At worst they’ll end up arguing with me that I did sign up and I should not be complaining about the mail because I opted in.

I love my mailsystem and the control it gives me, but today I’d really like that ‘this is spam’ button. In one simple click I could set a filter to bulk any future mail from this sender, send a notice to the sender that their mail was viewed as spam by one recipient, and give a small negative to that sender’s reputation. Maybe that would stop them from spamming me.

This question is asked over and over again and there is no one answer. There are a number of reasons and all of them interact with one another.

What factors have recipients mentioned?

• High frequency – mail that is too frequent can annoy recipients and they’ll hit this is spam
• Low frequency – mail that is too infrequent may be unfamiliar and unexpected and recipients will report the mail as spam
• Content – mail that has content that recipients don’t like can annoy recipients into reporting spam
• Mailing after recipient has unsubscribed – while CAN SPAM provides for 10 days to process an unsubscribe request, recipients often have much shorter expectations
• Unrequested mail – do you really have permission from the recipient? Do they want and expect your email?
• Mistake – sometimes recipients select large portions of their mail box and report all the mail as spam. Real mail can get caught in the selection and reported as spam.

The only one of these issues that is outside the control of the sender is the mistaken complaint. All the others are things that senders can affect.

Here at Word to the Wise, I often work with clients who are seeing delivery problems related to high complaint rates and the resultant poor reputation. I work with these kinds of clients to sift through their data to maintain as many good email addresses as possible. At the same time, in order to improve reputation the number of unengaged recpients needs to be as low as possible.  Working closely with clients I help them design and implement a strategy for list hygiene to improve reputation, response and return.

We start with a series of questions about the complaints. If you don’t know what is causing the complaints, then you can’t resolve the underlying problem. Some questions to consider.

• Is this unusual complaint behaviour? If so, what changed recently?
  • Have we added new addresses from a new source?
  • Have we resolved a problem resulting in more emails in the inbox?
  • Did we change our frequency?
  • Did we mail new or unique content?
• Are complaint rates consistently high?
  • How are we treating our recipients?
  • Are we sending mail they expect and anticipate?
  • Are we actually sending opt-in mail?
  • Are we setting expectations appropriately during the opt-in process?

Once you have an idea of why the complaints are happening, you can address the systemic problems.

Remember, it is extremely rare that a high complaint rate is the only problem with a mailing program. Usually, I find there are other list performance problems including poor open rates, poor click through rates, all evidence of low recipient engagement.

It can be a challenge to fix a mailing program with high complaints and low recipient engagement. The process takes longer than many managers like. However, the only real options are to spend so much time dealing with delivery and reputation problems that there are no strategic decisions being made or step back and make the strategic plans that create a sustainable email marketing program with few delivery problems.

One of the issues they commented on is that suppression lists are being passed around and some mailers are actually spamming them. This is something that used to be common, where spammers were harvesting email addresses from opt-out forms and then spamming the addresses or selling them to other mailers. This is why some ISPs and anti-spammers recommend recipients not unsubscribe from mail that they never subscribed to.

In the last few years there has been conflicting data on the prevalence of harvesting unsub or suppression lists. The FTC determined that there was no risk to recipients from unsubscribing. Lashback is now seeing some spam coming into their test addresses.

Overall, there are people who will continue to be suspicious of unsubscribing from mail they do not expect. This will drive up spam complaints and lower delivery. While responsible mailers are not the cause of the negative perception of email, they are competing with the spammers and scammers and sometimes recipients may not draw distinctions. This is why building relationships and trust over email marketing campaigns is such a critical part of delivery.

So how to avoid subscriber’s remorse?

The obvious one – and stop me if you’re heard this before – is sending relevant, timely, useful emails. Unfortunately, remorse can set in long before you have the chance to establish your value through your future emails. So your “remorse reduction strategy” needs to begin before the subscriber has even opted-in.

He lists a number of strategies to minimize subscribers hitting the this is spam button because they did not get the mail they were expecting from a sender.