Good mailing lists can go bad without the proper maintenance. Perhaps the single biggest problem here is the inevitable “churn” of subscribers among the big ISPs. People change ISPs at a pretty good rate, and it’s fairly likely that johndoe@aol.com is a totally different person today than the person who signed up with that address a year ago.Maintaining a Good Address

[Part One]

Good mailing lists can go bad without the proper maintenance. Perhaps the single biggest problem here is the inevitable “churn” of subscribers among the big ISPs. People change ISPs at a pretty good rate, and it’s fairly likely that johndoe@aol.com is a totally different person today than the person who signed up with that address a year ago. If the old John Doe subscribed to your list and you email the new John Doe – guess what? You’re a spammer. Or at least you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone that you’re not.

To minimize the effect of this churn, you need good bounce handling. It’s not like AOL switched the email address from one person to another overnight; there was some period where there simply was no johndoe@aol.com. If you had sent a mailing then, it would have bounced. And you should have received and processed that bounce.

You must remove addresses that hard bounce from your list. There are two kinds of email bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces. A hard bounce is the ISP telling you “There is no such user.” Even if there might be such a user in the future, the future one did not sign up for your list. You must remove that address. A soft bounce means that the email didn’t make it to the user for one reason or another; Internet connectivity, mailbox full, etc. It’s a good policy to also remove addresses that soft bounce after some number of bounces. Our system removes an address after two newsletters in a row soft bounce from the same address.

Of course, you’re not going to get bounces if you don’t send out mailings. If you sit on your mailing list for a year and then start sending email, you are going to have some irate people on your hands. You need to send mailings at least once a month to keep the list current and get those much-needed bounces.

Processing bounces is an art form in and of itself. They come in all shapes and sizes, and there’s no standard for how the ISP tells you what the problem is, and what address is affected. Fortunately, there are products that can help. I’d recommend using something like Boogie Bounce to make sure that you are effectively processing bounces.

We’re almost done! Soon you will be the operator of a legitimate, confirmed opt-in mailing list. You’ll be able to increase revenue while not drawing the ire of millions of people.

If you Love Someone, Set Them Free

Every mailing must include information on how to opt-out from future mailings. You really can’t be too thorough with this: we include a URL that does it with one click (again using a unique ID approach to avoid abuse), an automated reply-to address, and an administrative address that reaches a real live mailbox that I personally read and take any needed action on.

It’s also a best practice to include the IP address that confirmed the opt-in in each mailing. It doesn’t have to be the most prominent thing in the mailing; a simple “You are receiving this mailing because you confirmed that you wanted it. This email address was confirmed by WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ at 12:00am, Jan 3, 2003” will suffice.

Now that you’re one of the good guys, you can calmly and professionally reply to anyone who accuses you of spamming. And it will still happen, just a lot less than you’re used to. Don’t take it personally, of course, and after a while of operating a best-practices list you’ll have a solid reputation and will be able to deflect any wayward criticism.

One thing to be wary of, though, is the issue of terminology. The spammers out there don’t often include the text “This message is unsolicited spam” in their emails; they’re sneaky and don’t hesitate to claim “this is a double-opt-in mailing list” or “this email was confirmed.” Of course, that’s a blatant lie, but it does leave you in the position of sometimes not being believed when you say those same things.

Be aware that in some circles, such as the news.admin.net-abuse.email usenet group, “double-opt-in” is a lost cause, and people are convinced that only spammers use that terminology. On n.a.n-a.e, as it’s called for short, the accepted phrase is “confirmed mailing list.” You can also refer to it as a “closed loop” mailing list. If and when the time comes to discuss your mailing list with anti-spam activists, just try to be clear about your confirmation process and don’t throw out “double-opt-in” or even “confirmed” as blanket assertions – unfortunately, the real spammers out there do that same thing.

Your Affiliates, Your Business

No article on mailing lists and spam would be complete without discussing affiliates. Affiliates are both a bane and boon, as every adult Webmaster knows. On the one hand, they drive traffic, which in turn produces revenue. On the other hand, their actions reflect on the program they are promoting, and it’s very easy for a rogue affiliate to completely ruin your reputation – and turn a decent profit doing so.

Managing affiliate programs is beyond the scope of this article, but the point I want to stress is: do not let affiliates get away with practices that you wouldn’t do yourself. That’s just good advice in general. If you’re going to work hard to have a good reputation, you’d be crazy to allow some get-rich-quick affiliate to ruin all that work just so they can make a buck.

Make it clear in your terms, and prominent in your affiliate signup process, that you will not tolerate affiliates who engage in spam. Be aggressive about shutting them down, be responsive to spam complaints, and do what you can to get a reputation as an affiliate program that will not tolerate unethical practices.

Register with abuse.net, and make sure you have a functional abuse@yourdomain.com mailbox that is monitored by a real live human being.

And, if one of your affiliates does fall off the wagon, be responsive to those who complain! Let them know if you’ve had other complaints about the same affiliate, provide them with a link to your terms and conditions, and let them know what action you plan to take against the wayward affiliate. It is absolutely critical that you respond to complaints in a professional and sympathetic manner.

The Next Step: Profit!

Every month, Bondage.com sends out over 50,000 copies of our monthly newsletter. We get maybe 100 bounces, another 50-100 automated opt-outs, and six to eight messages to our real-live admin address. Those lost subscribers and the time spent responding to those six to eight people is a small price to pay for a completely legitimate mailing list that doesn’t cause us problems with our ISP, and doesn’t generate a ton of “DIE FUCKING SPAMMER” email (of course, it still generates some of both, as there will always be someone who doesn’t remember opting in, whose ISP turned an address around too quickly, or who is showing off to his wife – “Of course I wouldn’t sign up for this filth!”)

It sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? It’s really not. There’s some software work, and some ongoing maintenance work, but compared to the alternatives of either not having a mailing list or having a mailing list of thoroughly pissed off people, it’s not only the least stressful option, it’s also the most profitable.

Resources:

Email Marketing: Before beginning an advertising campaign via the Internet

http://www.tmisnet.com/~strads/business/index.html

News.admin.net-abuse.email: Newsgroup for discussion about spam and related topics

News://news.admin.net-abuse.email

Spamcop: A system for reporting spam

http://www.spamcop.net

Aiken is the co-owner and founder of Bondage.com, a Website dedicated to the Bondage, Domination and Sado-Masochism (BDSM) community since 1995. Aiken is also a Tech Chat Board Moderator here at YNOTMASTERS. Aiken can be reached via email at aiken@bondage.com.