Karen J. Bannan wrote an excellent article today which appears in the New York Times Business Section, "When They Say You Are a Spammer". Oftentimes writers miss technology stories and a good mention ends up being a confusing one. Karen is known for getting it right the first time and often writes about technical subjects as if she were in the industry itself. We thank her again for the coverage.

The story is an important one, featured in a new small business section of the New York Times. As reputation technology develops the binary decisions it makes can sometimes stop legitimate email from being delivered, as was the case with the company in the story. They rented a bad list and quickly found out the ramifications of bad data. This phenomena also sometimes affects purely transactional and one to one email senders, the average US company- and can send them into a panic when all of sudden their email stops getting delivered.

But "when they you are a spammer" is in almost every single case a very real call to action, that something is broken in your email process- bad data, an open relay, a send to a seed address or perhaps its time to change your ESP or audit your in-house process. A good compliance checklist should address these issues and proactively keep you off blacklists. Check out the LashBack Reputation ToolBox for more resources.

We are encouraging everyone to attend the July 11-12th FTC SPAM Summit Workshop in Washington, DC at the FTC Conference Center.

Read LashBack’s official public comment:

The Next Generation of Solutions

When the CAN-SPAM Act took effect on January 1, 2004 there was little technology available to enforce the law as written and even less clarity on what exactly needed to be enforced. The Federal Trade Commission has often commented officially in remarks and publications that the promise of new technology would make it possible to reasonably enforce the law. This day has finally arrived.

Rather than developing rules for an untouched market, the CAN-SPAM Act’s legislative intent was in part designed to both standardize and regulate the amount and quality of email being received by consumers in the United States in an email marketplace described at the time as the Wild West. Legislative  intent was to address a huge  problem: too much spam. From those days in 2002 and 2003 of the Act’s authoring, the email industry’s understanding of the spam problem has grown tremendously as has numerous technologies around authentication, compliance, reputation and deliverability. An eco-system is evolving that brings a comprehensive set of real solutions to the email marketing industry.

The idea of spam is now tiered into legitimate commercial email from companies with in-depth compliance programs, who monitor reputation each day and enforce not only regulations in the CAN-SPAM Act, but their own best practices and internal corporate email sending policies on themselves and sending partners. “Collaborative Compliance” is not only what’s next, it’s what’s now. Congress and the FTC need to know that these companies not only exist but are proliferating and influencing and in many cases requiring sending partners to have compliancy programs in place.

The remaining bottom tier of email is what the average consumer would regard as almost unintelligible junk. This gulf is being widened by ever-evolving filtering and blocking technology that can literally turn off a Sending IP and stop the flow of email from it. This can create conflicts where the standards and laws of one country are different to those of another country. Since technology doesn’t often recognize political boundaries, the final step in email’s development will be accepted global compliance standards.

LashBack is the first and only company to offer a complete CAN-SPAM Compliance Monitor and Resolution solution to email marketers. Currently, LashBack products, services and data are being leveraged by leading email marketers and service providers with many more companies in the process of adoption. LashBack is watching in real time our client companies improve their sending reputations and not only accept –but enforce- CAN-SPAM compliance and sending best practices.

This is the critical component to solving the spam problem: enforcement is now possible in a consistent, standardized and equitable system which rewards compliant senders, penalizes non-compliant practices technologically and financially and identifies and separates criminal actions, from non-compliance issues.

LashBack believes we must advocate equitably for every party to the email eco-system: consumers, receivers, ISPs, ESPs, affiliates, publishers, ad networks, agencies and advertisers. Philosophically LashBack believes we need to evolve from the “fighting” spam mentality, to a position where each party is again equally advocated for. We respectfully ask the  FTC and Congress to allow Authentication, Compliance, Reputation and Deliverability technologies to reach full adoption to assess the impact on the amount and quality of email received by consumers in the United States.

Furthermore we ask the FTC  and Congress to address issues unknowingly created by the CAN-SPAM Act including “Suppression List Abuse” wherein marketers who develop lists of consumers who opt out of email offers have those stolen or harvested and those consumer receive even more email from the act of opting out.

We thank the FTC for this opportunity to share our insight and ideas on the challenges and opportunities we see in email marketing.

Today MAAWG, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has issued "the MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices (BCP) with collaborative input from both volume senders and Internet Service Providers. The new best practices recommend sender email technologies and subscription methods to improve deliverability rates for newsletters and permission-based email marketing."

LashBack applauds any effort to establish standards and remind senders of best practices for deliverability. Even more we support and try to facilitate senders working with receivers and ISPs. We believe the industry is well-versed in what to do, but often lacks a mechanism to enforce these internal policies and external regulations on actual email campaigns. If a regulation is impossible to enforce is it really regulation? If no one implements a best practice, is it really a practice?

The LashBack mantra is "monitor and resolve". It’s a diplomatic way for our clients to tell their sending partners we are watching what you are sending and when what you send conflicts with our internal policies, we are going to call you and ask you about it and work with you to correct it. If what you are sending is non-compliant or illegal, we could very well terminate our relationship with you in favor of companies working hard to be compliant.

An excellent reputation means you are enforcing the law and your best practices and policies.

This is not about playing "gotcha" but establishing excellence in sending email and demanding the very best of each other for consumers. The collaborative environment we operate in, means we are in this together, legally and financially. What you do, affects my reputation. And it could hurt or help our business collectively. LashBack is about facilitating that relationship, empowering marketers to monitor what they send, and enforce what they say.

We encourage every organization with email marketing members to work with us to monitor their membership to enforce the very same guidelines, best practices and regulatory compliance they require of members to comply with. It would be of tremendous value to their membership and to email marketing. We can work to advocate for clients and members in reaching the excellence they are capable of with our assistance and technology.

Resources:

MAWG Press Release on Best Practices

MAWG Best Practices PDF