Tag Archive for 'unsubscribe'

Confirmed unsubscribe

Published
by
laura
01Dec
in Best Practices
.

Whatever one might think about confirming opt-ins I think we can all agree that requiring someone to jump through hoops and confirm an unsubscription request will just annoy that person.

Today I attempt to opt-out from a discussion list. It’s one I *thought* I had opted out of previously, but I could find no record of the request anywhere. OK. So I imagined unsubscribing, I’ll just unsub again and keep better records.

After digging through the headers, I find the unsub link and dutifully mail off my unsubscribe request. I then receive an email that requires I click on a link to confirm my unsub request. This causes me to grumble a bit. I have heard all the arguments about forged unsub requests and the various reasons this is good practice. I believe none of them. Requiring people to confirm an unsubscription request is bad practice.

In this case, the mailing list is a discussion list so there is no CAN SPAM violation. However, I know that some commercial mailing lists have also implemented confirm your opt-out request. For commercial mailing lists, this is a CAN SPAM violation. It’s also just plain rude. If someone says, “Stop!” then you should stop, no questions asked

1 Comment

Just Leave Me Alone Already

Published
by
laura
19Nov
in Industry
.

I tend to avoid online sites that require you to register and provide information including email addresses. In my experiences companies cannot resist sending email and my email load is extremely heavy and I want less email, not more. Sometimes, though, what I need to do requires an online registration and giving an email address to a company I would really prefer not to have it.

Recently, I had to register online with AT&T Wireless. My iPhone was getting repeated text spams and I wanted it to stop. The only way to do this is register online. Registering online required giving them an email address.

The text spam has stopped, but they have been sending me almost daily emails since then. Each email has an opt-out, and I have availed myself of every opportunity to opt-out. Each opt-out link takes me to a different site, a different page, a different process.

In two of the cases, AT&T seems to be violating the new CAN SPAM provisions. For one, I had to tell them what I wanted to opt-out of (email or phone) and then was taken to a page where I had to input my cell number, my email address and request to be removed. In another case,  I was forced to login to my online wireless account and then was able to change preferences. In only one of the 3 opt-outs I have requested, was the opt-out form actually a single click, just requiring my email address.

I am wondering just how many mailing lists AT&T added my address to and how often they will continue sending me mail after their 10 days are up. It is this level of frustration, that mail just keeps coming and coming and coming even after the recipient has repeatedly attempted to opt-out, that causes people to hit the “this is spam” button on mail that the sender thinks is opt-in.

But, really, AT&T, please stop sending me mail that I never asked for, and that I have repeatedly asked you to stop sending me by jumping through your hoops. Oh, and you may consider sharing the opt-out data with all the same internal groups that you shared my email address with initially.

8 Comments

FTC Opt out clarification

Published
by
laura
09Oct
in Industry
.

In early July, the Magilla Marketing newsletter has an article about how email preference centers may now be illegal due to the clarifications published by the FTC. Trevor Hughes of the ESPC is quoted extensively, lamenting about how marketers cannot legally interfere in the unsubscribe process.

The FTC’s opt out clarification “complicates things in that it demands simplicity when simplicity may not be the status quo,” said Hughes. “The two opt-out mechanisms that are permissible [under the law] as we understand it are a reply-based mechanism where you reply to the e-mail and write ‘opt-out’ in the subject line or body of the message, or alternatively, that you click through to a Web page [to opt out]. But it has to be a single Web page.”

Personally, I see no problem with a single web page. As I wrote about last week, forcing recipients to use a preference center to unsubscribe means that people that are not really customers cannot unsubscribe when you start sending them email.

I do not think the FTC rulings mean the end to asking for information, or even the end of offering more choices than just opting out. According to the FTC senders must allow recipients to opt out on the first page, without anything more than the unsubscribe address and the preference. The rules do not say that the marketer cannot link to another page or ask for more information on the unsubscribe page. The rules only say that marketers cannot require more information in order to process the unsubscribe.

Trevor’s complaints seem to me to be nothing more than the lamenting of a marketer that marketers MUST make things difficult for rubes recipients in order to keep recipients on their marketing lists. His statements are extremely recipient unfriendly. Of course, it is his job to advocate for marketers and not consider the experience or desires of recipients.

In the world of non-internet direct marketing, very little consideration has been given to the recipient. Direct marketers live on the mantra that if they send enough to a recipient, eventually the recipient will make a purchase. Sadly, for the poor direct marketers, recipients actually have more power against the marketer online than they do in the real world. Annoying recipients, sending offers they do not want, sending more than they want, all that works against the sender. Smart marketers will learn to adapt. Poor marketers will lament how unfair it all is.

3 Comments

Lashback tackles opt-in fraud

Published
by
laura
08Sep
in Delivery Improvement
.

Last week Lashback posted a three part series on opt-in fraud.

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.

1 Comment

PayPal Followup

Published
by
laura
02Jul
in Best Practices
.

I thought I would give everyone a brief update on my continuing saga with trying to unsubscribe from PayPal’s marketing list. Because of what I do, I have some options not available to the average recipient. One of the things I did is ask people I know if they had any contacts at PayPal who may be able to address this issue.

I was given an internal contact at PayPal by a colleague who works at one of the certification companies. I sent the PayPal contact a brief summary of my experience. She explained she was not in a department that handled email any more, but that she forwarded my mail on to the responsible people. A little later I received another message saying that I had been unsubscribed and they were examining the tapes of my call. She also mentioned that their unsubscribe process would be changed “sometime in mid-July.” I was not given any details.

A colleague who attended the recent AOTA meeting in Seattle offered this comment.

I sat at a table during lunch with Michael Barrett, the CISO of Paypal recently at AOTA and I can assure you he is fully aware of CAN-SPAM laws and changes. Whether that translates to all layers of the company or not is another issue (one they are clearly not handling well). Ironically, his trust presenation talked about these types of battles for large companies.

In addition to looking for some personal contacts at PayPal, I contacted the vendor where I made the purchase from in February using a credit card through PayPal. He shared with me the information PayPal sent to him, including the notice that my PayPal account was unregistered. Unequivocal evidence that the last time I used their service, that I did not have an account with them. They had no business sending me that email.

His information confirms that their marketing message did violate CAN SPAM. The claims of the customer support reps that I had an existing account are contradicted by PayPal’s own statements to the vendor in February. There was no opt-out on the message as I received it.

0 Comments

How not to handle unsubscribes

Published
by
laura
24Jun
in Best Practices
.

On the heels of my unsubscribe experience last week where an ESP overreacted and unsubscribed addresses that did not belong to me, I encountered another deeply broken unsubscribe process. This one is the opposite, there is no way to unsubscribe from marketing mail at all. Representatives of PayPal have only been able to suggest that if I do not want their mail, that I block PayPal in my email client.

I had a PayPal account years and years ago. They made some extensive privacy policy changes back in 2003 and when I did not actively agree to the new policies, they closed the account. That account closure seemed to take, I heard nothing from PayPal. In early 2008, I made a purchase at a vendor that only accepted credit cards through PayPal. Normally, I do not do business with vendors who only accept payment through PayPal, but there appeared to be a way to make the payment without establishing a PayPal account, so I went ahead and made the purchase.

The receipt from that purchase came from PayPal, and mentioned that I had an existing PayPal account. I figured that because the address was the same as the 2003 account that the boilerplate did not understand ‘closed accounts’. I brushed off the notice and did not worry about it.

On June 23, I received marketing email from PayPal. The mail offered 10% off my first eBay purchase, if I set up an eBay account using the same address on my PayPal account. Yay. Spam. Oh, well, no big deal, there was an unsub link at the bottom of the email. It is PayPal, they are a legitimate company, they will honor an unsubscribe. It will all be fine.

Or. Not.

Clicking on the unsubscribe link in the email takes me to a webpage that tells me I had to login to my account to unsubscribe. But I do not have an account!

They clearly think I have an account linked to the email address they mailed. I decide to see if I can recover the account and then unsubscribe. I put in the email address they sent the marketing email to, the password I probably would have used had I actually set up this account and hit “submit.” PayPal now asks me to set up 3 questions to use to recover my account in case I forget the login in the future. Uh. What? No. I do not want to set up an account, I want them to stop sending me email. I abandon that webpage.

I then attempt to recover the password to the account. Put in the email address that PayPal is sending email to and hit “forgot password”. PayPal, as expected, sends me an email. Click this magic link to recover your account. PayPal then asks me to input the full number of the credit card associated with the account - the credit card number I do not have. What account? What credit card number? Is this from my 2003 subscription that was closed? Is this from the purchase I made in February? I abandon that webpage.

The recover password email helpfully lists a phone number I can call for assistance so I call. In order to be able to talk to someone I have to enter my phone number. And the credit card number associated with my account. I resorted to randomly pounding on “0” and telling the voice recognition software I wanted help. Eventually, it got so confused it transfered me to a real human.

Tragically, the voicemail system was actually more helpful than the real human on the other end. Distilling down hours of sitting on the phone with them, I am told the following:

  1. There is no way to unsubscribe from mail at PayPal.
  2. Everyone gets spam and I should not care about spam from PayPal
  3. I can block mail from PayPal in my mail client.

During the conversation, I was repeatedly informed I did have a PayPal account. I asked when the account was opened. The first rep said “June 23, 2008.” You mean today? The day I attempted to login to the account to unsubscribe from the mail you sent me? Yes. That is the day I opened the account. She was incredibly unhappy when I pointed out that was after I had received the email, was my attempt to unsubscribe from the email and did not explain why I was receiving unwanted email from them. After going in circles, repeatedly being placed on hold and asked for credit card information I used to set up the account, I requested a supervisor. The supervisor told me the account was opened in September 2007. September? What? I have no recollection (or email!) about dealing with PayPal in September. I decide to stop trying to figure out the account and asked if there was any way I could make PayPal stop emailing me. She helpfully explained everyone gets spam, that I should block PayPal in my email client and then hung up on me.

Steve, noticing that I was in a slight temper, worked his way through their voicemail system and talked to another rep. Overall his experience was the same. There is no way to unsubscribe from PayPal’s emails without logging in to the preference center and there is no way to login to the preference center without the credit card number associated with the account.

After about 2 1/2 hours of trying to deal with the PayPal reps, we gave up. Clearly there is no way to actually unsubscribe from PayPal mailings.

How many recipients who don’t want to receive mail from Paypal are going to spend several hours fighting through an unhelpful phone tree and being hung up on by customer support reps? Almost none of them. Instead they’re going to hit the “This is spam” button to block the mail, damaging the reputation of the ESP sending the mail.

Worse than that for PayPal, though, is that eBay/PayPal are strongly in favour of DKIM, and they are signing all their mail - solicited and unsolicited, marketing and transactional - with DKIM. That means that recipients hitting the “This is spam” button in response to not being able to unsusbscribe from unwanted mail will also damage the reputation of all mail sent by PayPal, including their transactional mail, not just the reputation of the ESP sending the bulk mail.

Last week it was a little sender at a small ESP failing to correctly manage unsubscribes. This week it is one of the largest senders of email who cannot get unsubscribes right. One of the underlying problems is PayPal’s choice to irrevocably link account management and marketing email. PayPal policy states they cannot let me have access to another person’s financial information and owning an email address they are sending email advertising to is not proof of ownership. In other words, the account established with my email address is not actually my account and I have no right to stop receiving mail.

I actually understand this and appreciate PayPal’s attempts to protect the financial information of their users. However, a major flaw in the current process is that PayPal does no email address confirmation with the account. Therefore, people receiving email from PayPal cannot make the email stop. They do not want to reveal financial information to me if I do not have the right to see it? Good for them. That’s fine, that’s great, but they have to make it possible for recipients to make the mail stop.

One of the early reps I talked to even claimed it was Federal Law that they had to get me to verify the account before they could unsubscribe me. She is very, very wrong. CAN SPAM is reasonably specific about unsubscribes. Currently there must be a way to unsubscribe over the Internet. I do not believe PayPal is currently compliant with CAN SPAM because of the hurdles they have erected that make it more difficult, or even impossible to unsubscribe from their marketing mail.

Since the original CAN-SPAM legislation was passed the FTC has acknowledged recipient concerns that marketers are skirting the existing requirement that they allow recipients to unsubscribe by making unsubscription possible, but requiring recipients to go through a complex process, or require unreasonable additional information (such as, say, credit card numbers) from recipients in order to discourage users from unsubscribing.

To show that this sort of behaviour is not an acceptable way to offer unsubscription according to CAN-SPAM, the FTC have included detailed clarification on this point in their rulemaking that takes effect on July 7th.

§ 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or imposing other requirements on recipients who wish to opt out.

Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that any recipient pay any fee, provide any information other than the recipient’s electronic mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps except sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page, in order to:
(a) Use a return electronic mail address or other Internet-based mechanism, required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3), to submit a request not to receive future commercial electronic mail messages from a sender; or
(b) Have such a request honored as required by 15 U.S.C. 7704(a)(3)(B) and (a)(4).

10 Comments

Unsubscribe policies

Published
by
laura
18Jun
in Best Practices
.

Our local brewpub has an email list. For various reasons I have multiple addresses on the list and finally decided that getting 4 copies of each mailing was silly. About a week ago, I sent in unsubscribe requests for 3 of the addresses. Today I get another 4 copies of their mailing. That’s not good. Luckily, I know one of the delivery folks at their ESP so I send her an email.

I know unusubscribes can take a few days to process, but it has been seven and CAN SPAM is pretty clear about the 10 day requirement. My first email to their delivery expert is just asking how long unsbs normally take. She responds they take 3 - 4 days. Uh Oh.

I tell her I unsubscribed these 3 addresses (with the unsub links) on 6/10 and received more email this morning. I did tell her that there were multiple subscriptions and they were all legit, but the reasons were really not important. Just that I didn’t want quite so many emails and their unsubscribe process seemed broken.

Now we get to the part where it all goes a wee bit pear shaped. The next email I get back from her explains why I am on so many lists. Fair enough. The more concerning bit is that they have not only gone through their database and unsubscribed all my addresses, but they have also found Steve’s addresses and unsubscribed those too. What the email does not contain is an explanation of why their unsubscribe process broke.

At this point I am a bit annoyed. I did not want all my addresses unsubscribed, just some of them. And the bit about unsubscribing Steve? That’s just silly and unnecessary. Another round of email ensued, pointing out this is bad and please put everything back how it was except please unsubscribe these three addresses I sent originally.

Things are back how they were, although the technical staff is still looking into how their unsubscribe process broke. The initial thought is that during a technology transition they lost some unsubscribe requests.

This whole process has bothered me for a number of reasons. One is the utterly cavalier attitude of the delivery people at the ESP. Their unsubscribe process broke. This is, to my mind, an emergency. ESPs have been fined for broken unsubscribe processes. Two is the process of unsubscribing addresses that belonged to a completely different person. The ESP did explain the policy behind that, sorta.

When members who wish to unsubscribe write to say they are still receiving emails, the first thing we do is to search the database by name and unsubscribe other addresses if the information… first and or last name, birthday and location…matches their profile. Many people don’t remember the address they used, and may be enrolled at several without realizing it. We feel it is better to unsubscribe first and then double-check with the member than to have them receive another unwanted email. We reply to let the member know what we have done so they can let us know if they want us to change anything.

I get that. But, in this case, I was very specific about the addresses I was still receiving mail at and my initial email even said that I just wanted to receive mail at fewer addresses, not that I did not want email at all.

Generally a disappointing experience. I also blame the ESP much more than I blame the brew pub. The reason I recommend companies use ESPs is because sending mail, and managing subscription practices is what ESPs do. They are the experts and they should be guiding their customers to do the right thing. In this case, the ESP fell down on the job.

2 Comments