IMO, any entity that attempts to pass the minimum legal requirements to not be labelled, prosecuted, or suffer some form of censure as a “spammer” is quite a good indication that there will be scant or zero implicit permission present on the part of recipients to receive messages from that sender.

Closely aligned with this is the level of engagement, likelihood of recognition of the sender, and “acceptance” of both the relevance and timeliness of the content by the recipients. Once these fall below a certain level, the recipient will regard it as “spam” – regardless of any “legal entitlement” to send.

High volume senders with relatively low distribution costs experiencing drops in open and click rates can easily, and will readily, simply increase sending volumes and frequency to hit targets – regardless of the detrimental effects to all “good” senders.

This combined with the enormous increase in peer-to-peer email volumes as a result of increasing Social Media adoption and daily deals alerting – and it is not long before the receiving mail servers become swamped – at particular times of the day when usage volumes spike.

Hence the increase in “intelligent inboxes” and tightening of filters which focus more on positive interactions between sending domains, domains and IP addresses in combination, content (including URL’s), and volume patterns. They have little choice, they can’t let it all in – and must distibute the load.

The “clever” or maybe more “tricksy” emailers/spammers will continue to devise ways to “fly under the radar” of these filters – and stopping them will continue to be the challenge for the ISP’s/webmail providers – and this fight will continue to negatively effect “good” senders of high volume email and will increase the delivery (rather than distribution) costs for good senders.

To me, this is the primary reason for well formatted, good content, sent to engaged subscribers, from domains and IP addresses with good sending reputations being diverted to “junk” folders.

Nobody is immune – or can make themselves so. Good practise will triumph in the end but it becomes more expensive.

When major players with dominant market share start to cross this line, it becomes very worrying. I recently (yesterday) received an unsolicited email with a do not reply from THE global search giant to an email address that had been “invented” by placing the word “info” in front of one of my domains, written in a language I do not speak, informing me of changes to their Privacy Policy – really?

Back in 2010, I linked to your article “Marketing Email or Spam” in a piece that I hoped would clarify the whole spam and delivery conundrum. If interested, you can find that post at http://blog.group-mail.com/2010/05/08/spam-sender-reputation-isps-and-recipient-behavior/

Here are some things that frustrate me about spam, the misunderstanding about it and the approach to resolve it:

1. People who think that anyone who sends email to a large email list are spammers.

Even when I tell people that Amazon and most successful companies use email marketing regularly to communicate with people and [insert shock horror] even promote special offers, new products and services and to send other messages relevant to their business; they just can’t bring themselves to draw a distinctive line between legitimate, opt-in group email activity and Nigerian 419 spam. It’s like trying to discuss the history of the world with a Young Earth Creationist. So frustrating.

2. People who don’t understand the difference between email sending limits and spam.

I often get calls from people saying “My ISP won’t let me send my newsletter to my opt-in customer list because they say I’m spamming.”

When I tell them that their ISP isn’t, in fact, calling them a spammer — that it is just an email sending policy that they (and all other outgoing SMTP mail servers) have in place to control the volume of email traffic being processed by their mail servers each hour/day and NOT a judgement about what they are sending, they are reluctant to accept it — UNTIL I get them set up with a mail server that has a daily send limit which actually supports their list size and sending frequency and they see first hand that everything gets delivered as it should.

3. How difficult inbox delivery has become for legitimate senders over the years as a result of the huge business that antispam has become. There are myriad (and non-standardized) antispam products and services everywhere now, like toll booths on the email highway to control spam. There is a lot of money to be made in the antispam business. Unfortunately, the money being spent isn’t having any significant effect on the volume of real spam being sent.

This is frustrating, because 80% of the world’s spam (you know, the viagra, stock, weight loss stuff and everything else that is completely irrelevant to us and clogs up our inbox) is sent from only 100 spam gangs (comprised of 400-600 KNOWN people in the world) according to Spamhaus’ Rosco database.

It is unfair that the 2 billion other emailers around the world have to pay the price for the ineffective strategy to thwart those 400 individuals from sending the billions of messages that they do each day to make a profit from the 0.00001% conversion rate that they get (1 conversion for every 12,500,000 emails!).

We once called spam “batch and blast”. Ironically, antispam is taking the same approach at the moment. They are disrupting billions of emailers in order to control the spamming of 400 individuals. It’s like they are carpet bombing the Internet to defeat 100 spam gangs.

We could pay those 400 spammers 100 times more than they make by spamming to NOT spam if we just sent the money spent on antispam directly to them rather than spending it on all of the gates and gatekeepers and products and services and companies who have their sales forces out sweeping the globe to help us to keep spam away.

We could, in fact, hire those 400 spammers (who seem to always be one step ahead of the antispam industry) to devise a much more productive antispam system than we have now — a system that doesn’t make legitimate senders jump through so many hoops to send a simple email to their customers and expect a good inbox delivery rate.

Recently, I posited that antispam is actually more annoying (and costly) than spam ever was. You can read it at http://blog.group-mail.com/2011/08/20/is-antispam-worse-than-spam-a-libertarian-view/

Thanks again Mark!

Tom

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With best regards from the GroupMail Team
Tom O’Leary (marketing)
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GroupMail Email Newsletter Software
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