The Beef on Spam

Well, I nearly fell over when I heard those stats (especially the last one). Who are these 8%? Please tell me so I can make sure my campaigns do not hit any of these clueless wonders. And just think about it, everyone has a friend that seems to have waaaay too much time on his or her hands. You know the emails I'm talking about.

Quite often, when we execute an email marketing campaign, we'll buy lists from vendors or sites like Yahoo! or ad networks. We make for darn sure third-party companies have solid privacy policies. We are buying the list from a company that most likely acts as a middleman. Where is the list coming from? More importantly, what's its privacy policy? This is where it gets sticky.

Jim Manis, chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association, defined mobile marketing at the Washington hearings. The ads were referenced as "legitimate" and represent a relationship where marketers pay carriers for ads to be displayed on users' wireless devices.

Guess what? The next threat in the spam war is said to be wireless. As an advertiser of wireless campaigns and as a consumer obtaining emails over a mobile office, this scares me more. I've accustomed my email sifting to look at an auto preview mode. In this mode, I can typically see if the message is spam or not. The small screen size and limited view of my mobile phone makes this impossible to do. Inevitably, I've clicked when I should have deleted.

MSN, Yahoo! And AOL has banded together to take on spam from both a hardware and software perspective. This might be the first time these big guys have ever agreed? At this time there is no law to prevent spam. However, this has gotten the attention of a few US senators. Recently, a bill called the CAN-SPAM Act was reintroduced. The bill would make it a federal offence to send spam using false return email addresses.

While this is all well and good, what do we do as advertisers? What do we do as consumers? One look at my deleted folders is enough to make the Pope blush.