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Re: Unsubscribing and HTML e-mail? (was: Blocked)

Subject: Re: Unsubscribing and HTML e-mail? (was: Blocked)
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 09:00:07 -0400



Hart, Geoff wrote:

D-ck* Margulis reports:
* Sorry, didn't want to trigger anyone's spam filter. <gdrlh>

Color me not laughing, Geoff.

That makes a lot of sense, since most spam also includes instructions on how
to be removed from the mailing list, and those instructions are intended for
only one purpose: to confirm that anyone who clicks on the link has a valid
address and is thus a premium target for further marketing. Sad but true.

Balderdash. You're right about how real spam abuses the unsubscribe device, but that is no reason for spam filters to have such an assumption built in. The goal of spam filtering is to distinguish between legitimate messages (in our case business-to-business marketing messages) and crapola. As any legitimate marketing message is required to have instructions for unsubscribing or opting out, you cannot use the existence of such instructions as a scoring criterion. That's just incompetent software design.

Don't know about your local laws, but a better way (if legal) might be to
use a double opt-in approach rather than advertisting how to get removed
from the mailing list. In this approach, someone must not only enter their
e-mail address in a subscription form, but also respond to an automatically
generated e-mail sent to that address to confirm that it really was them who
entered the e-mail address.
That's not an issue that has arisen in our case. The issues we run into are with corporate admins, not individual recipients. When the individual recipients realize they have inadvertently opted in to our mailings and wish to opt out, or when they decide they are no longer interested in our mailings, they find it easy enough to unsubscribe (sometimes they don't read that far and they fire off something vituperative, but we unsubscribe them politely anyway). What I'm interested in solving is the problem of their not receiving the emails in the first place.

HTML e-mail can look appalling in some e-mail
clients, but more seriously, HTML lets you send all kinds of unpleasantness
via e-mail, such as automatically opening graphics that can also be Web bugs
of various sorts.

One time we sent out an HTML email to our list that had been put together by another organization (a non-profit conference sponsor). I neglected to inspect the code for javascript, which it contained. That message was blocked by a much larger number of companies whose filters--legitimately, in my opinion--checked incoming HTML for any script content. I have no problem with that. I also have no problem with filters that block anything containing a virus. But I'm not aware of graphics being a problem. I mean, yes, I'm aware that the existence of a linked graphic causes some people's filters to block a message; but I'm not familiar with bugs that can be carried by graphics. Can you elaborate on that? And how, exactly, would you recommend constructing an HTML email that contained, say, your company logo and a photo of the keynote speaker, without resorting to linked graphics. Surely, you don't suggest MIME-encoding the graphics and embedding them in every message. That would be an even more egregious waste of bandwidth.

Perhaps you can compromise, as follows: Send your newsletter in HTML as a
simple, two line message:
This is to let you know that the Margulis newsletter is now
available at our Web site.
Click here to see the newsletter [URL]That lets you send a pretty, font-fondled two-line message with a nice background color, but leaves the newsletter on your site. Those who want it
will follow the URL; those who don't can simply delete it.

Nope. The same filters that catch "unsubscribe" also block "click." I might get away with it in a plain text message, but not in HTML.

Dick

---
[This E-mail scanned for viruses at mail.fiam.net]




Follow-Ups:

References:
Unsubscribing and HTML e-mail? (was: Blocked): From: Hart, Geoff

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