Israel has a new anti-spam law that takes affect today, December 1^st, 2008. Ultimately, it seems to boil down to: Opt-in is king. Companies who don’t already live up to the opt-in standard (with appropriate tracking of opt-in permission) seem to be rushing to reconfirm their email lists. ExactTarget’s contract requirements already require opt-in, so that’s a great start. But, if you send mail into Israel and/or have a presence there, I’d strongly recommend contacting an attorney for guidance. My (very limited) Hebrew skills make decoding the Israel Internet Association’s anti-spam website a bit difficult, but it does suggest to me that getting permission in writing is a requirement, as is labeling the message as an advertisement.

There’s definitely some confusion out there regarding what’s allowed and what’s not allowed under the law, and it’s unclear to me what ability there would be to take action against senders located outside of Israel, but it’s not the kind of thing that I recommend you find out for yourself. Our recommendation is always to comply with the legal requirements of every jurisdiction you’re knowingly serving mail to.

Sales are down. You’re having a slow quarter. You need to squeeze every last email address you can find for every last dime you can get. Let’s grab ‘em all – even the ones we haven’t touched in years – and send them a big email blast. Good idea? Bad idea?

BAD IDEA.

Why? Because it’ll harm your email deliverability. Batch and blast – grabbing up a bunch of old email lists and sending everyone a 20% coupon code – is going to get you blocked. Tailoring your message to the economy isn’t a bad idea. Throwing permission practices out the window because you feel you need to email more people – well, that is most definitely a bad idea.

ISPs care about reputation, and you build a reputation by staying true to permission. Old lists, bought lists, opt-out lists – mailing to any of these will spike your bounce and spam complaint rates. The result? You’ve just been identified as a spammer.

You might be hoping for that last minute revenue boost, but you could actually see a revenue decline because your mail is no longer getting to the inbox at AOL and Yahoo.

What’s the impact to your bottom line if you lose access to 30% of your list?

1) Merchant places a display in telling people to text their email address to a shortcode in order to receive a coupon.

2) In response, you send a link to a landing page containing a customized coupon.

3) Customer takes their mobile device to the checkout counter and uses  the coupon.

Sometimes, we get letters. Jared writes, “Its great to see your helping people get away with spamming. You should throw my email into your mass email spam lists. Get in line with the others.”

I find this type of email really frustrating. I don’t hear stuff like this all that often, thankfully. But when I do hear it, I wonder, what? Get away with spamming? You really think that’s what ExactTarget does? Help people spam? Yuck.

Jared also sent along a link to some old blog post that shows how long subject lines can be in different email clients. So, he might not be all that knowledgeable about email or have a clear picture as to what he’s mad about.

Regardless, that got me thinking. If somebody out there does think that about us, maybe I should take the time to answer the implied question. Do we spam? Allow spam? Help spammers? The answer is a loud and clear NO. NO, we are not spammers. NO, we don’t allow spam. NO, we don’t support spam.

ExactTarget is not a list broker. Don’t call us to buy a list. We don’t sell them. We don’t buy them, either, so spammers should feel free to stop trying to get me interested in their “guaranteed opt-in leads.”

We don’t allow clients to buy lists. This isn’t a lead generation system, and permission-based email doesn’t work with lead generation lists. It’s just not compatible.

ExactTarget is a tool. A really powerful and useful tool, one that allows our clients to mail their own customers. People who have signed up to receive email from them directly, not to mail random people that some company *thinks* might want to hear from them.

The six of us here on the core deliverability services team act as the spam police. We enforce our anti-spam policy, sending guidelines and thresholds, and the opt-in provisions of our contracts. We suspend, reform or terminate spammers regularly.

We look at what clients are doing constantly.

• If too much of a client’s list is filtered out at import,  
• If too much of their mail bounces,  
• If they receive too many spam complaints from a large ISP,  
• If they get blacklisted by a reputable blacklist like Spamhaus or Spamcop,  
• Or if they do something that shows me that they’re not complying with the opt-in consent requirements contained in our contract,  
• Then the client is funneled through our policy enforcement/best practices process to help address the issue, reform the process, remove the bad list, educate the client, and, if those steps all fail, terminate that client.  

Over the past month or so, we’ve worked with over twenty-five clients, guiding them on how to shore up their opt-in practices; giving them a clear understanding that only opt-in is allowed. For a few of those, we told them we’re not going to be able reach out to an ISP for assistance until a problem is resolved. In some of those past instances, our requirement has been that the client must reconfirm their existing email list.

We end up terminating an average of one client a month, and this month was no different. Of course, we like our clients a lot, and ones that can be reformed, we’d much rather reform them than terminate them. A reformed client means no more spam, and a client we keep means they keep paying us. Everybody wins. But, they don’t always want to work with us, or don’t always agree with our policies. And in those cases, it’s in our best interest to move on. So we do.

That’s what me and my team here at ExactTarget have done to stop spam lately. What have you done to stop spam lately?