Subscribe Now:

Search This Blog

Loading...

Followers

Red Flags

Posted by Annalivia Tuesday, January 5, 2010

I've been doing this job for a long time now, and over the years Ive seen certain types of phrases in support requests repeated over and over again. These correlate to bad IP stats so often that I've built a mental filtering system that flags these phrases. Some examples:

"All of the email we send is not spam, but legitimate communication that the recipient has requested from our clients."

"The contents of the email follow all of the CAN-SPAM guidelines!"

"Please remove the spam blocks so that our mutual customers can get these urgent and valuable offers that they specifically asked for."

"We are a legitimate business, we do not send spam!"

"Why are you targeting my 100% opt-in emails?"

"Let me explain our business model..."

There are many more such gems. Every single one of them sounds a loud "AOOGAH!! DIVE! DIVE!" alarm in my head, and inevitably leads me to IPs that are sending junk mail that people clearly don't want to get. The result of that finding should not require further elaboration here.*

The bottom line is that if a marketer is sending mail that is truly valuable and desired, he will not experience blocks...and if he does, he will have sufficient knowledge of what his customer did wrong that he will not use such verbiage in the trouble ticket.



*There is one exception to this rule. If I see "We are a legitimate business, we do not send spam!" and the rDNS of the IP indicates a corporate or government machine, 99.999% of the time they have a compromised host on their network, which generally horrifies them when they're alerted to the fact... and they clean it up as fast as humanly possible.

5 comments

  1. gfdsa Says:
  2. Oh, from my side that sounds familiar. I do try to avoid cliché phrases when I write to ESP or blacklists. But listing all of these ...
    What do you expect me to start a complain then? really ...

    what is wrong with "We are a legitimate business, we do not send spam!"?

     
  3. Annalivia Says:
  4. I'd suggest something like "I have a customer that made a mistake. Here's what I've done to fix it - can you lift the block?"

    I'll post something else as a follow up.

     
  5. Mike Says:
  6. I would suggest that you don't have to say anything at all. Simply report whatever issue you are seeing with all the relevant technical information. The person working the ticket will decide for themselves whether the 'problem' needs to be fixed or what the priority should be based on information they already have anyway.

     
  7. Annalivia Says:
  8. @Mike: you stole my follow up post! (You're right)

     
  9. joshuabaer Says:
  10. Annalivia - you forgot one of the best red flags... "I am a high volume email deployer. What we do is not spamming. It's high deployment email sending."

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVfIKsummxo

     

Post a Comment

About Me

I'm Annalivia Ford, long time anti-spam expert. I've been in the profession of blocking the bad guys and helping to translate ISP requirements into language that senders can understand for nearly a decade now, though I got into fighting spam as an amateur 15 years ago. I now work for IBM, wrangling outbound email and doing my best to keep things sane.

About this blog: I started it when I worked for AOL, and since my departure from there I have been remiss about regular updates (part of the issue stems from my agreement with my current employer). I will continue to post here now and then and meanwhile I hope the archives continue to be useful and entertaining.

I do not in any way intend to speak for my employer, past or present. The content of this blog is either opinions that are strictly mine, general observations, or information that is already in the public domain.

Have you got a question? Perhaps an idea for a blog post? How about a million dollars to give to Barry? Feeling ranty? Or just want to say hello? Please Email me!

ID YOU FIND A TYPO?? PLEASE TELL ME! I'm serious.

In the banner is one of my dogs, Daisy. She's a tireless hunter. If you know me, you'll have heard about her! She keeps me company during work, and fondly imagines herself to be Very Helpful.