Many people don't realize that when Brexit happened the United Kingdom ("UK") adopted their own version of GDPR, often referred to as the UK GDPR. When it comes to email marketing in the UK, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has made fairly explicitly clear that under the UK GDPR there are only two situations in which you can send someone email marketing: you must either have their prior consent, or they must be an existing customer (this is the so-called "soft opt-in").
Think the FTC and DOJ won't come after you if you violate CAN-SPAM? Think again. Experian's ConsumerInfo.com just got a rude awakening: you actually do have to comply with CAN-SPAM, or the FTC and DOJ will come after you - and win.
Google is ending a pilot program that allowed political campaigns to bypass the spam filter, and they have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that the RNC filed against them. Note that Google is not 'restarting' spam filtering in Gmail for political campaigns, as claimed by some, and that's because they never stopped. Confused? You won't be, read on.
Users of mass email services such as Gmass, Woodpecker, Lemlist and others, that have been using Gmail's API to send bulk email that tricked recipients into thinking that they were receiving personal one-to-one emails, have been put on notice today by Google: "Applications that use multiple accounts to abuse Google policies, bypass Gmail account limitation, circumvent filters and spam, or otherwise subvert restrictions are prohibited from accessing Gmail API scopes."
Did you know that it's a violation of LinkedIn's policies to send cold LinkedIn outreach messages? A lot (we mean a lot) of businesses use LinkedIn as their personal cold lead generation playground, but that is not at all what LinkedIn is intended to be, and LinkedIn's posted policies, and their very definition of spam, make that clear.
Why would people who request your email, maybe even pay to receive your email, still report it as spam? Here's why. By way of example, we have a customer who sends email out on behalf of a very large, very well-known institution in the financial investment world. Some of these mailings lists are paid mailing lists. By which we mean that the users paid to receive these emails. And yet, they still report it as spam. Why would they do this? Here's why.
We have officially rolled out our Feedback Loop Reports service today, with its own spiffy section on our website, and we couldn't be prouder.
Every so often we run into a sender who has a sense of entitlement - or even righteous indignation - about how an ISP should, must - even has to - accept their email. Whether because it's "requested" or opt-in or because it "complies with CAN-SPAM", the sender gets all in our face about how a given ISP has a responsiblity and duty to accept their email. Sometimes they even rant that it's required by {CAN-SPAM| tort law | the 1st Amendment | insert your favourite rant here}. Except, that's completely wrong.
You'd think that by now people would understand that spam complaints impact your deliverability, both to the inbox and, ultimately, even to the inbox provider themselves. Yet we regularly get questions and comments, both in the course of our business day, and in casual conversation, which make clear that there is something that people just aren't grokking, so here it is, put as plainly and clearly as we can put it: If you get too many spam complaints YOUR EMAIL IS GOING TO START GOING TO THE JUNK FOLDER and may eventually be blocked. Period.
You may not have heard of drip email marketing, or email drip marketing, but I can assure you that you know what it is. You have either sent it, or received it, or in some other way come into contact with it. Wikipedia - not always the most reliable source, but in this case accurate - describes drip email this way: "Email drip marketing is a form of e-mail marketing where a company sends ("drips") email messages to subscribers on a scheduled basis established using e-mail marketing software."
