February 2004

Dear AOL, please may I receive my emails?

The US counterpart of our EC Directive is the CAN-SPAM Act, which came into force in January. Although there are some key differences in how the issue of spam is being tackled, it's interesting to monitor the reactions to the Act. (On the premise that what happens over there sooner or later happens over here.)
The other side of the 'how to stop spam' problem is, however, what to do about the increasing amount of legitimate email being blocked by ISPs. That some ISPs have taken a stronger stand than others is well documented. This is an issue which very much concerns us in the UK.

For example, AOL has operated its 'whitelisting' policy for some time, in a bid to protect its subscribers from the dreaded UCE.

It may not be spam, but may as well be
The trouble is, AOL generates a high number of false spam reports. (A spam report from AOL means that in order to avoid being blacklisted the sender has to suppress the name and never email them again.) A false spam report can happen for a number of reasons, although AOL cites a common one as being that the recipient hits 'report spam' by mistake when they really meant to hit 'delete'. (The two buttons are adjacent - could be something for the usability chaps to look into perhaps?) So the recipient carries on looking forward to the next newsletter or update ... and it all goes quiet.

At best, email marketers are told that the AOL recipient has unsubscribed. At worst, they carry on sending without realising that they have been blacklisted by AOL. They may never know. All the recipient notices is that suddenly her opt-in emails have ceased coming, and no-one is any the wiser. If the one that cries 'spam' has made a genuine mistake, there are several hoops to jump through before he or she can start receiving email from that sender again. And it's our customers who have to do the jumping, not we marketers. Nice.

Sender beware: your marketing is in their hands
If you use a third-party ASP service, the situation is even more grim. In order to safeguard their whitelisted status, the ASP service may impose an even more draconian limit on how many AOL spam reports they will tolerate before closing your account - it may be as few as five.

This is all rather ironic if you find, like me, that a large proportion of spam emails appear as coming from AOL addresses, even if the headers are fake. I had to block the entire domain on one email address - and the spam reduced considerably.

To be fair, there is now talk of AOL being prepared to help email marketers by making reports available as to when and why email has been blocked. But whether they will talk to anyone other than the biggest players, who knows.

ISPs have a role to play in tackling spam, but there has to be a more efficient way than to assume everyone is guilty until proven innocent.