Step Away From That Spam Button!

Just looking over an article at b2bonline and finally I have crossed the line –

 

 ” I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

 OK. What did it this time?  The report is about a study that says something that anyone who has ever sent a marketing email to businesses or consumers is brutally aware of – that legitimate marketing emails are routinely marked as SPAM by contacts who are simply too lazy to bother to unsubscribe or either unaware or unconcerned with how a “spam”label affects the senders.  Or even worse – they might be people who have gone to some sites on spam like Spam Abuse and been told – point blank – not to bother with removal requests.

 The “Email Intelligence Report” conducted by Return Path, found that 70% of emails given the dreaded “This is Spam” were legitimate emails meaning the sender had the necessary permission to send them.  But that permission makes no difference when businesses get their email accounts suspended or get blacklisted for crossing what is actually a very small % of allowable spam complaints – about 1 in 1000 emails.

 Sure, the regulations were put in place to protect consumers and businesses from irritating, unwanted and often fraudulent email senders – true spammers – the kind who scrape lists and routinely blast out hundreds of thousands of unwanted messages.  But wait a minute Mrs and Mrs “let’s protect the public”regulators.  The REAL spammers DON’T CARE.

Spam complaints DON’T HURT THE BAD GUYS – BUT THEY’RE KILLING THE GOOD GUYS.

 I know how frustrating it is to get a ton of junk mail, but I also know how difficult it can be when legitimate business emails get labeled as spam. And so, since labelling a message as spam doesn’t do anything to hurt the worst offenders, I believe that the only reasonable option is to REMOVE the option to label a message as spam and replace it with an unsubscribe request.

Unfortunately, politically, this would be about as popular as health care, increased taxes or more deadly boring coverage of fiscal cliff, so I think that at this time, the only thing you can really do about it is to become a loud and annoying person whenever you hear friends, family, relatives, business associates and perhaps even total strangers talk about how they identify emails as spam and let them know that they’re being IDIOTS!

 

 

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