"Methinks Ye Doth Protest Too Much, Madam!"
Okay, I’m gonna’ say it! I am really fed up with all these self-appointed spam nazis who have made it their personal crusades to save the world from spam.
Who are these people and who put them in charge? Why is that crackpot on his houseboat across the pond accorded so much respect and kudos for his high-handed methods? It reminds me of the old saying about who’s running the loony bin.
Too often, I think, these folks are far worse than the spammers they are supposedly fighting the good fight against.
This is not to minimize the reality of the costs of spam. It can overwhelm servers. Employees waste too much time on the clock deleting spam (or are they reading it?).
On the other hand, how many times have you had to try to deal with an IT department, either in your company—or worse, someone else’s company—to resolve some seemingly simple glitch? Ever had your email blacklisted and blocked by some little ISP that’s run like a personal fiefdom? Ever wondered why that crucial business email that was supposed to generate an immediate response just kind of went into a black hole?
Here are some of the fun details that make up wa-a-ay too much of my time in any given week.
• My client, the bankruptcy lawyer, was blacklisted by that proprietary Internet service that is still part of Time Warner, Inc. Why? Because he used the word “bankruptcy” in the subject line of his email sent through my email marketing ASP. We are whitelisted. But, his email address was blacklisted. It took more than two weeks to get his email address off the blacklist.
Oh! He can’t use that word anywhere in his emails, even though it is essential to describing what he does.
• Last year, when a new, prestigious client tried to send a test email to a list of nearly one hundred people in the company, all with corporate email addresses, they all bounced back. It took two weeks…again…something about that timeframe…to persuade their IT guy to take my phone call. Of course, he insisted that it had to be our fault that they weren’t receiving these emails.
What was it really? Someone has mistyped an IP address and inadvertently blacklisted us. Additionally, they had also misrouted all internal emails to the wrong server. Took five minutes to fix, but it took two weeks to get them to admit that it just might be on their end. In the meantime, I came very close to losing a new client and, more importantly, my reputation.
And finally, the source of the title of this post….
• Got an email from a client saying his emails were not going through to people at one particular small ISP outside of metro-New York. The owner of the ISP said we were claiming to be Truste members when, in fact, it was a LIE! My client by this time was also convinced that we were LYING. The ISP owner recommended he dump us immediately.
This is what you get for being a good guy. You see, we are Ironport Bonded Senders and the seal states that it is Truste-verified. Big difference.
Didn’t matter. He’d blacklisted us and claiming every email anyone received that had been sent through us was spam.
So, after thoroughly researching these false accusations, exchanging emails and phone calls with the client, I called the jackass to try to reason with him and explain that he’d made a mistake and could he please rectify it so people could receive emails sent from our servers.
What do I get in return? The guy starts screaming, calling me a liar, a spammer, and that he’d prove it by sending every piece of spam from our servers to us if I’d only give him my email address. I said, “Fine. Let me give you my email address.”
No such luck.
As I repeatedly tried to give him my genuine email address, he continued screaming and protesting that I “protested too much.”
And, you think the spammers are bad?
Silly rabbit.
Dealing with these crackpots and their colossal, self-righteous egos is enough to drive me to ask for government intervention!
When are they going to start calculating the cost of sloppy filters and every other piece of programming designed to keep those bad spammers out of our inboxes in terms of missed emails, lost business, even family funeral notices that get waylaid?
See? There really is another side to the story…
Quote of the day:
"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable." -- Eric Hoffer
Who are these people and who put them in charge? Why is that crackpot on his houseboat across the pond accorded so much respect and kudos for his high-handed methods? It reminds me of the old saying about who’s running the loony bin.
Too often, I think, these folks are far worse than the spammers they are supposedly fighting the good fight against.
This is not to minimize the reality of the costs of spam. It can overwhelm servers. Employees waste too much time on the clock deleting spam (or are they reading it?).
On the other hand, how many times have you had to try to deal with an IT department, either in your company—or worse, someone else’s company—to resolve some seemingly simple glitch? Ever had your email blacklisted and blocked by some little ISP that’s run like a personal fiefdom? Ever wondered why that crucial business email that was supposed to generate an immediate response just kind of went into a black hole?
Here are some of the fun details that make up wa-a-ay too much of my time in any given week.
• My client, the bankruptcy lawyer, was blacklisted by that proprietary Internet service that is still part of Time Warner, Inc. Why? Because he used the word “bankruptcy” in the subject line of his email sent through my email marketing ASP. We are whitelisted. But, his email address was blacklisted. It took more than two weeks to get his email address off the blacklist.
Oh! He can’t use that word anywhere in his emails, even though it is essential to describing what he does.
• Last year, when a new, prestigious client tried to send a test email to a list of nearly one hundred people in the company, all with corporate email addresses, they all bounced back. It took two weeks…again…something about that timeframe…to persuade their IT guy to take my phone call. Of course, he insisted that it had to be our fault that they weren’t receiving these emails.
What was it really? Someone has mistyped an IP address and inadvertently blacklisted us. Additionally, they had also misrouted all internal emails to the wrong server. Took five minutes to fix, but it took two weeks to get them to admit that it just might be on their end. In the meantime, I came very close to losing a new client and, more importantly, my reputation.
And finally, the source of the title of this post….
• Got an email from a client saying his emails were not going through to people at one particular small ISP outside of metro-New York. The owner of the ISP said we were claiming to be Truste members when, in fact, it was a LIE! My client by this time was also convinced that we were LYING. The ISP owner recommended he dump us immediately.
This is what you get for being a good guy. You see, we are Ironport Bonded Senders and the seal states that it is Truste-verified. Big difference.
Didn’t matter. He’d blacklisted us and claiming every email anyone received that had been sent through us was spam.
So, after thoroughly researching these false accusations, exchanging emails and phone calls with the client, I called the jackass to try to reason with him and explain that he’d made a mistake and could he please rectify it so people could receive emails sent from our servers.
What do I get in return? The guy starts screaming, calling me a liar, a spammer, and that he’d prove it by sending every piece of spam from our servers to us if I’d only give him my email address. I said, “Fine. Let me give you my email address.”
No such luck.
As I repeatedly tried to give him my genuine email address, he continued screaming and protesting that I “protested too much.”
And, you think the spammers are bad?
Silly rabbit.
Dealing with these crackpots and their colossal, self-righteous egos is enough to drive me to ask for government intervention!
When are they going to start calculating the cost of sloppy filters and every other piece of programming designed to keep those bad spammers out of our inboxes in terms of missed emails, lost business, even family funeral notices that get waylaid?
See? There really is another side to the story…
Quote of the day:
"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable." -- Eric Hoffer
posted by Lydia Sugarman at
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
2 Comments:
Spam costs some of us a LOT of money.
Until about 5 years ago my small isp easily handled email for 80 or so domains with a 200MHZ Pentium computer. The volume of spam has caused us to upgrad our system three times.
We currently get over 30,000 pieces of "dictionary attack" spam (non of it deliverable) each day. I know they come from about 1500 "zombie" computers (desktop pc's like yours taken over by spammers), but since the army of zombies change, and there are so many of them, it is impossible to block them.
Spam and anti-virus checking that many pieces of bad email every day takes lots of expensive resources.
It was never my intention to minimize or ignore the tremendous challenges faced by companies like yours as well as corporate IT departments in stemming the tide of all this mal-mail.
My point is that there needs to be a balance which we haven't found yet to allow for other businesses that depend on email deliverability for the success of their businesses.
All too often, there seems to be too many occasions where someone who's been fending off assaults of spammers and zombie machines doesn't exercise the best judgement and tolerance for other innocent senders. And, the cost to those companies can be extremely expensive, too.
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