[.Note, this rant will get back to SPF by the bottom. Have patience.]
On Jul 11, 2004, at 2:12 PM, Koen Martens wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 02:04:45PM -0700, John Ludgey wrote:
>> Commercial email is important to our customers who place high value
>> their
>> customers. Customer loyalty and retention is very important and
>> acquiring
>> new customers very expensive; so it is essential that they not be sent
>> unsolicited mail.
>>
>> We maintain customer and master opt out lists and never send to those
>> people.
>
> When I get an unsollicited email that says 'click here to
> opt-out' or something like that, the last thing I will do is click on
> the opt-out link. It just doesn't work like that, since 99% of the
> opt-out links are mainly for verifying that the email account is
> active.
For one company that I manage email for, I reject mail from "opt-out
spammers" as I call these. This does include a lot of bulk mail for
things that people may very well welcome. But I've been told, "if it
isn't work related, then don't consider it a false positive". I would,
of course, whitelist upon request. An ISP couldn't follow this policy,
but it's not inappropriate for this business.
What I find most interesting is that the bounces for opt-out spammers
given an error message like
553 opt-out spam not welcome. See
http://www.slauson.com/emailpolicy.html And that document contains the text
We also block sources of the most common "opt-out" spam we receive.
Opt-out spam is
where the source of the spam does not lie about who they are, but they
falsely
claim that the recipient opted-in to receiving that mail. They provide
the
recipient with a (possibly bogus) remove process. If you have been
mistakenly
blocked as an opt-out spammer, please contact postmaster@slauson.com.
Be prepared
to provide evidence that the intended recipient, themselves, agreed to
accept your
email.
So far (and we've been doing this for years) not a single request has
come into postmaster about this. (And yes, mail to postmaster is NOT
blocked). None of the blocked mass mailers have felt fit to try to
persuade me that recipient really did request the mail.
> How do you collect 'customer' email adresses, and how do you make sure
> that the owners of these adresses really asked for the mail?
This of course is the question for bulk mailers. Indeed I have a
personal interest in this. For the past three years I've been "list
bombed" every February. Someone, for reasons entirely unknown to me,
signs up my address to a whole bunch of lists. The lists range from
major address list providers to small companies. A few years ago,
whoever signed me up used the real name of "Poop Poop". So I got a
whole bunch of mail saying,
Dear Poop,
Thank you for your interest in ...
Or
Dear Mr Poop Poop,
Here are the exciting offers you asked for
and so on.
Efforts to educate the managers of such "nominating" lists (where
anyone can "nominate" anyone else's address to a list) met with very
limited success.
So unless a bulk mailer can provide me with proof that the owner of an
email address wanted that address on the list, I will consider them an
"opt-out spammer".
But, and others may legitimately choose other policies. SPF helps
people implement their policies. Just as I might blacklist an opt-out
spammer, someone else may decide the whitelist them. SPF primarily
helps recipients determine whether the main comes from who it says it
does. Once you know who it comes from, you can set any policy that you
think is right for your system.
So, again, I am pleased that a bulk mail operation is looking at SPF.
They are wise to because it will make them easier to whitelist by those
who wish to.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/ -------
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