Is It Spam If You Asked For It, But No Longer Want It?
from the questions-questions-questions dept
A new study from an email marketing firm is warning that ISPs are blocking a lot of "permission based" emails in their spam filters. The announcement is clearly implying that this is a bad thing and a problem that marketers and ISPs need to work on to solve (and, of course, this company wants to show off that they have some sort of solution). However, you have to wonder if this is really that big of a "problem." Most people don't define spam by the guidelines of things like CAN SPAM, but under FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle's spam definition as "anything I don't like." Under that definition, plenty of things that people at one time opted into they might now consider spam. Of course, that might not be true in all cases, and ISPs that are blocking without giving users a chance to review/whitelist what was blocked are an issue, but if people aren't missing these emails... is it really a problem?
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False negatives are a problem, and people should make sure they don't contribute to it. No matter what type of e-mail it is, if you agreed to receive it you should not label it spam. You may not want to get it any more, but others might.
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Is It Spam If You Asked For It, But No Longer Want
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grey area
- Sometimes the sender has made you somehow unwittingly "agree"
- Sometimes I have signed up for something and then been unable to un-sign-up
I don't know of better solutions to this than to filter that crap out at my end, which wastes their and my bandwidth and cycles.[ link to this | view in chronology ]