2007 / May 31^st/ Hi, my name is Kyle Neath, and I’m a spammer

… At least, Campaign Monitor tells me I am. This is a story about a legitimate webmaster trying to use the power of newsletters to promote his site. And how Campaign Monitor deceived, then insulted him and lost a customer.

How the list began

A long time ago, I started an email list for Poetry with meaning. I heard about the glories of Campaign Monitor, and naturally signed right up. I created the form explaining exactly what it was for and even used Campaign Monitor’s own signup form to add people to the list.

Everything seemed pretty good, but signups were pretty dismal. To increase signup rate, we started offering free stickers to those who signed up. Signups increased pretty drastically, people got stickers, and everyone was having a happy fun time.

How the list grew

Now, we all knows it’s Human Nature to want free stuff. So, eventually our site ended up on a one of those “free stuff” websites, listing that if you just give your email you get some stickers. In a couple of days, we had about 1500+ signups — when all was said and done, we had about 2,000 new signups, bringing our total subscriber count to around 2,500. To me this was cool… I guess, since I got a lot of new subscribers.

Did I con these people into signing up? Did I offer them a million dollars? I offered a little 2″ x 3″ sticker with “poetrywithmeaning.com” on it. Nothing too fancy. In all honesty, I didn’t quite know why people were signing up. But that’s their own prerogative and I can’t control it.

The new site was born

About a couple of weeks ago, we launched the brand new site: http://poetrywithmeaning.com. (Which you should totally check out, and play with. I put a lot of work into it and I think it’s pretty sweet). I was super excited about it, and decided to leverage my 100% opt-in newsletter. I whipped up a quick email (plain text only)

Fellow poets!

The time has finally come for Poetry with meaning to unveil the next step in online poetry communities. That’s right, version 2.-brand-new-0 is finally here!

Head on over to http://poetrywithmeaning.com to see the new site! We’ve got all sort of new features (don’t worry, all your poetry and comments are still there).

* New discussion area http://poetrywithmeaning.com/discussions
* New blog http://poetrywithmeaning.com/blog
* New “Ask an expert” area http://poetrywithmeaning.com/tools

Head on over to the blog to see the official announcement and all the new features.

We’ve worked hard on this new version and we really think you’ll like it. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to send us an email at support@poetrywithmeaning.com. We hope to see you around our new diggs soon!

Thanks!
Poetry with meaning staff
support@poetrywithmeaning.com
http://poetrywithmeaning.com

Sending the campaign

To send the campaign, I had to justify my list to CM. So I put in the little box a quick explanation of how I got so many people — including the bit about the stickers. I was approved within a couple of minutes and they sent out my campaign.

Now, let’s review a few facts:

1. 100% of my subscriber list had subscribed through a Campaign Monitor form on my site, clearly explaining that they were signing up for a newsletter. This newsletter would contain information and updates on Poetry with meaning.
2. I was sending out an email about Poetry with meaning.
3. The email conformed to the usual CM mandates… unsubscribe link, etc.
4. The email contains no “spam” content. It’s pretty clear… pretty much to the point and is even just plain text.
5. This was my first email campaign with CM, and I was kind of excited about it.

Bye, bye spammer asshole

A little later, I received what I can only describe as a insulting letter after around 20 people had marked my emails “spam.” It called me a spammer, told me I damaged their business and all of my contact information had been banned from Campaign Monitor forever. It told me I blatantly ignored their spam policy.

• Why did people mark it spam? I don’t really know. Probably because people wanted free stuff, and don’t pay attention to what they sign up for. Not much control I can have on this side…
• Accroding to CM’s anti-spam policy, you are pretty much in the clear if: “An email newsletter subscribe form on your web site.” That’s exactly what I had.
• The total amount of people marking it spam was about 1%… their limit is 0.02%, which evens out to half an email for my subscriber list size. I was screwed before I even started.

Spam I get from CM constantly

I find it funny that CM bans people so easily, yet allows friends to spam to their heart’s content. I remember a while ago that I was signed up for the 37Signals spamlist (talking about new products, happenings at their blog, etc) twice because I had signed up for a paid account at Backpack. I sure as hell didn’t give them explicit permission to send me spam — but they were allowed to.

But me? No, I can’t send out my legitimate promotion because my subscriber list isn’t big enough.

Is that fair? I don’t really think so.

1. 

   Chris Harrison

   May 31^st | #

   Let me start off by saying that I feel your frustration: I’ve been there. We’ve been using CampaignMonitor for client newsletters for quite some time now. And we did run into a situation where a campaign we mailed out on behalf of one of our clients received a high number of spam complaints. It put our account in jeopardy. (BTW, I am not a Freshview employee.)

   Your first mistake was (probably) sending stuff to AOL and Hotmail users. They are one of the few providers that makes it incredibly easy for people to report messages as spam. CM gets notified every time a spam report is received.

   I wouldn’t take the banning personally. You fit the profile of a spammer. Your first and only campaign received a high number of spam complaints. Spam complaints are what gets CampaignMonitor’s servers blacklisted. I’m not sure if you’ve ever had to deal with getting blacklisted, but it sucks.

   (The company I work for provides hosting + email to a number of our customers and a few of them decided they would start sending out bulk emails to their customers using our mail server. They were legitimate users, btw. It was only a matter of time before our mail server was blacklisted by AOL and a few other ISPs. Being blacklisted made us and all customers on our mail server unable to send/receive email from the servers that had blacklisted our mail server’s IP. Our email administrator then had to spend several days going back and forth with them to get our server unbanned and white-listed. Trust me, it’s not a fun process. Especially when you have hundreds of clients calling up and bitching about their email not working properly while all of this is happening.)

   Considering the fact that CM has to have servers/ips “in good standing” to ensure delivery for ALL of their customers, it makes sense that they would act as quickly as possible to eliminate a spam threat in order to appease the ISPs that might blacklist them.

   Seeing as your email was a legitimate response to signups made via the website, a quick note to the folks over at Freshview (Dave Grenier is one of the most helpful guys I’ve ever dealt with!) probably would have gotten things resolved and your account restored.

   I’m sorry you had such a bad first experience.

2. 

   Chris Harrison

   May 31^st | #

   Oh… the way we dealt with the spam complaint issue on future send-outs was by scrubbing our lists. We purged it of AOL and Hotmail users, because lets face it: they’re trigger happy in reporting spam. Now, before I send out emails, I usually do a quick search of all AOL/Hotmail subscribers and I unsub them. Sure, we’re probably missing out on a few legitimate recipients, but if it means keeping the number of spam complaints down, it’s worth it.

3. 

   Dave Greiner

   May 31^st | #

   Kyle,

   First off, I wanted to apologize if our spam complaint email came off a bit strong. It certainly wasn’t our intention to offend you in any way.

   I also wanted to clarify that it’s not us calling you a spammer, it’s your subscribers. Unfortunately in the eyes of the ISP’s they are complaining to, it doesn’t matter how you originally got their permission to email them. If they mark your email as spam, then that ISP thinks it’s spam, it’s that simple.

   So, eventually our site ended up on a one of those “free stuff” websites, listing that if you just give your email you get some stickers. In a couple of days, we had about 1500+ signups

   This is the only reason you had this spam problem and why your account was eventually closed. You need to remember that the people joining your list just to get the free stickers aren’t interested in poetry or your (very nice) new site design. I can understand you getting excited about the big spike in numbers, but if they’re not interested in what you have to say then they don’t offer you much value.

   These days permission isn’t enough, it’s relevancy that counts.

   Of course, if you’re happy to discontinue sending to this particular list and only include those that subscribed before you appeared on the free site, we’d be more then happy to open your account again.

   Finally, we have the 1% spam complaint limit in place for all our customers, so if high profile users like 37signals or even eBay ever exceed this, their account with us will be closed too. We also use common sense when applying our limits to smaller lists so 1 or 2, even 10 complaints will never see your account closed.

   Again, my genuine apologies for rubbing you the wrong way here. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to continue this conversation directly.

4. 

   Dave Greiner

   May 31^st | #

   Thanks for sticking up for us too Chris, we must have been writing our comment at the same time.

5. 

   Katie

   May 31^st | #

   People tend to mark email as spam when they are too lazy to unsubscribe. Sure, you might have one click unsubscribe option at the bottom of your email but if they won’t bother to scroll down to it – you’re screwed.
   You could always run your own emailing system and deal with bounces and emails marked as spam (Microsoft has this great free service that reports emails marked as spam to Hotmail accounts). Sure it’s a lot more hassle and you’ll have to dig into it but if you really love your subscribers, then why not?

6. 

   tom

   May 31^st | #

   Dave,

   I make emails every day for a direct mail/alternative health company and have just recently learned about the company almost getting blacklisted over 2 — that’s right — 2 spam complaints to our ISP. Seems a bit unreasonable considering we crank out literally hundreds of thousands of emails a month to be sent to blue hairs all over the nation.

   But before that situation, and subsequently this discussion, I wasn’t really aware of blacklisting in the truest sense, nor the potential harm that can come of me accidentally reporting “spam” in Hotmail when the email was something I subscribed to. I mean, I just make the emails at work and pass them off to another team to blast. I mean, what do I know—I’m just a code monkey!

   Your software is so damn easy (and beautiful) to use, it means that anyone who is uninitiated in the world of email blasts can do it without using expensive software and list databases. And for better or worse that means we’re the helpless flock and you’re our shepherd… Having used Campaign Monitor, but not being cognizant of the “dangerous” aspect of email blasts, I think perhaps the site needs a more detailed explanation as to WHY you have to be so careful about being singled out as a potential spammer, and how best to avoid it (like scrubbing Hotmail and AOL users—if it comes down to it).

   The one campaign I sent out did get a number of spam complaints, but as far as I know you guys haven’t dinged me for it. Color me lucky. And now I know better thanks to this discussion.

7. 

   Kyle

   May 31^st | #

   Dave: Thanks for the response, I really do appreciate it.

   I think there could be a lot of things improved upon what happens before / after a situation like this from your side. The emails saying you’ve closed your account is… well, pretty rude. And I’ve heard this from a number of people after bringing up my personal experience, and them sharing their own. There’s no mention of “if you think this is an error… do this” It’s more of a: sucks for you dude, but we don’t wanna see you no more.

   Also I definitely think there’s a good deal more warning that needs to be done. From all the places on the CM site, the only mark of permission I needed was the signup form. There’s no mention while you’re creating campaigns (or at least, that I could notice) that if you have a small number of spam complaints your account will be closed forever. From my point of view, I had two thumbs up (one from your anti-spam page, and one from a personal approval at CM).

   I guess I’ve learned my lesson: Scrub AOL & hotmail users (100% of the complaints were from these two). Sucks that I had to learn the hard way & you had to lose a customer as result.

8. 

   tom

   May 31^st | #

   Dave & Kyle,

   A little mea culpa. I went back and looked at my first and only campaign, and saw the little link to the “about spam” pop-up. Suffice it to say, I overlooked that too many times (and probably some other caveats while setting up the campaign). But I’m sure others have missed it as well. Perhaps a big glowing, rotating badge for impulsive dummies such as myself could prove more effective.

   As an aside, every spam complaint that I received was from hotmail, msn, or aol. I will be scrubbing these from any future campaigns…

9. 

   Dave Greiner

   May 31^st | #

   Thanks for the suggestions Tom and Kyle. We’ve already reviewed the way we approach the account closure and made some changes accordingly.

   One last point about the idea of scrubbing AOL and Hotmail recipients. This approach is a bit of a band aid solution (and a bad one at that) that will only last so long. More and more ISP’s are bring out these junk feedback loops, so soon it won’t just apply to Hotmail and AOL alone.

   I agree there is no way to avoid false positives here, some people are just lazy or the email interface makes lodging a complaint too easy. But, if you ensure you’ve correctly gathered permission and your email is relevant and wanted by your recipients, this is never going to be a problem.

10. 

    Ryan Meashaw

    June 23^rd | #

    It’s a bit disheartening to hear this about Campaign Monitor and how easily my account could be dismissed because of a few so-called lazy or forgetful subscribers. I too was unaware of this face and agree that it should be stated more explicitly by Campaign Monitor.

    I haven’t actually sent any campaigns through CM yet, but I am currently maintaining a subscriber list for a client that plans to start sending out monthly campaigns very soon. These are folks who have either signed up for the email newsletter in-store or through the web site, so I doubt there would be many marking it as spam. But you never know and there really doesn’t seem to be much margin for error.

11. 

    Dave Greiner

    June 23^rd | #

    Ryan, no need to be disheartened. If you’re sending to people that have signed up in store and at your client’s web site, and you send them relevant, timely content, you won’t have a problem at all. The only reason Kyle ran into any problems was because he was listed on “one of those free stuff web sites”. These people weren’t interested in poetry, they were interested in free stickers. It’s that simple.

    You’ll need more than 15 spam complaints and that rate will need to exceed more than 1% of your total subscribers. Even then, it’s still open to negotiation, and if we can see you’re one of the good guys, we’ll reopen your account, just like we did for Kyle.

12. 

    Ryan Meashaw

    June 24^th | #

    Hi Dave,

    Thanks for the reassurance. As I stated there probably won’t be a problem and I would really hate to have to blacklist hotmail and aol subscribers. It’s good to know you guys have our backs to to speak and understand that mistakes happen.

13. 

    Macho

    July 23^rd | #

    Hi All,

    To spammers: I HATE YOU!!!

    thats all,
    -macho

14. 

    tim parsons

    August 25^th | #

    Hey Kyle, I think to be fair to CM, you should edit the top of this post to include your conclusions that appear later – to catch those lazy buggers who don’t read down the page far enough.

    I’ve been using CM for a couple of years now for a bunch of campaigns, have rung their office a few times for support (I’m in Sydney too – and they’re incredibly helpful), and they deserve our support.

    Just my 0.02c worth . . .

    Cheers!

15. 

    Nick Toye

    February 14^th | #

    Well I have just been informed by Matthew Patterson that I will not be approved of a campaign because I didn’t explicitly tell the people I met that I was intending to send them a newsletter.

    Now I got to this point because I am a member of a Networking group. http://www.bsbnetworkingclub.co.uk – I regularly meet new people who come to the meeting to network, and we swap business cards, discuss possible business opportunities and leave the encounter with the words to this effect – “here’s my card, feel free to contact me in the future”.

    Now I checked with CM to see if I qualified based on that – I felt I did, Mr Patterson felt I didn’t, and that to me implied that he saw me as a Spammer, because if I am not then I am approved? No?

    He pointed me towards this link:

    http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/entry/558/about-permission/

    On it, it quite clearly states this:

    You can only email subscribers using Campaign Monitor if you obtained their permission in any of the following ways.

    One of the following ways is:

    They gave you their business card

    “If someone gives you their business card and you have explained to them that you will be in touch by email, you can contact them. If they dropped their business card in a fishbowl at a trade show, there must be a sign indicating they will be contacted by email.”

    It doesn’t state:

    “You must explicitly tell the person you are emailing that you intend to send them a newsletter peridoically”.

    It’s really disappointing that this inconsistency and strictness is in place. I certainly won’t be giving my business to them, and I will be informing as many of my friends as possible, that CM are not the right road to go down.