Justin Mueller's Random Bits | Things that just catch my attention.

Okay, it has been a little bit. I have been bad at updating my blog. I recently went to Santa Clara, CA for ZendCon and learned a bunch of new things and got to tour Facebook and Google’s HQs. But on the flight I was thinking about something I have dealt with recently, building a mailing list with purchased form placement.

Building a mailing list with purchased form placement

The concept of buying placement to get more sign-ups for a newsletter is more so suited for building up an existing mailing lists. Building a list from scratch this way causes pain in the form of spam reports being they, by nature, seem to get more spam complaints. And without a pre-existing list these can lead to dangerous ratios with your email service provider (ESP).

My thoughts on why the high spam complaints occur are due to the fact that some of these people entered bad emails or forgot they did the quick little sign up for your newsletter. And also, if you are not clear with what they are signing up for, abuse your list, or are not clear in your newsletter of who you are the users will think you are spamming them. And of course you have the users that just hit spam so your email goes into their junk folder not knowing it hurts you or spending the time to unsubscribe.

Possible method of attack

One method of attack could be to pass these users through a service/server that is more lenient initially. You then send them the most recent newsletter and then this account/server takes the initial spam reports and drop the “bad” users. Then you can take the remaining users and pass them into the ESP of your choice and will have a list of users that are already okay with your list. Hopefully preventing the high spam ratios on your main account.

Closing

This is just my thoughts on the problem based on issues I have tackled and the nice part about this is that after a little time you will have a large list of contacts and you can stop using another service being your ratio of spam complaints will be minimal as long as you are not abusing your lists.