The Email Delivery Guru

I received a lot of feedback in response to my May 27^th post where I talked about the “permission failure” inherent in use of business cards as an opt-in process.

Commenter Reno Lovison said, “I believe on some level giving someone a business card is tacit permission to contact you. SPAM is getting something from someone I have never met, never invited to contact me and who has no idea whether I might be interested in their message. One newsletter or message from someone whom you given a business card to, with the option to opt out is within the spirit of business networking.”

Is tacit permission good enough? It's not, because implied permission causes deliverability problems. Assume you have permission (instead of obtaining explicit permission), and you garner more spam complaints. An escalated level of spam complaints means you're going to find your mail blocked or bulked by ISPs. Regardless of how you think it should work, ISPs have decided that it's okay for recipients to complain about you for any reason – and assuming you have permission where you have none (in the opinion of the recipient) clearly qualifies.

If you desire 100% deliverability to the inbox, tacit permission isn't good enough.

Don't take my word for it, though. Commenter John Caldwell followed up with, “There's a big difference in making direct 1:1 contact to an email address when given a business card and adding that address to a distribution list. If I give you my business card you have may contact me individually, but add me to a distribution list and you're spamming.” Well said.

Commenter Gregg Dourgarian accuses me of pushing “vendor BS” for daring to say that explicit opt-in permission is king. Which vendor would that be, exactly? Since it's been best practice for the eleven years that I've been in this industry, and it's something that I've been advocating the entire time, whether as a unix administrator, blacklist and filter developer, or best practice consultant to various list managers.