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!

To spammers: I HATE YOU!!!

thats all,
-macho

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.