Data Protection and Spam
Why Spam Prevails
Data protection has huge importance for email marketing, and there is a great deal of applicable legislation to be complied with. The most obvious contravention of data protection laws is seen in the form of so-called spam email. This is commercial email that was not requested by the recipient. The prevalence of spam is due to a number of factors:
- Lack of technical barriers to prevent it.
- Trivially easy forgery of message content and origin.
- Complacency by admins and marketeers.
- No standards for opt-in records.
- Lack of legislation with any teeth.
Buying lists
Bought-in lists are generally of very poor quality. If you want to fail to deliver a large proportion of messages, irritate uninterested people, generate bad publicity, destroy deliverability to your good lists, and generally drag your brand through the mire, buying a cheap list is a good way to do that. There are good list providers, but they’re not cheap (in either sense).
Before Spam
The protocols that email is built on (and still in use today) were mostly designed in the 1970s, and they did not take into account not trusting the senders, so everything was open and free. Since then advances have been made on all of the above fronts but the spam problem is not yet solved.
There are various weapons for dealing with these problems: spam filters and real-time blacklists deal with part of the first problem, SPF and DKIM would help solve the second if more widely used. Unfortunately the only real solution for the spam problem requires replacement of the world’s entire email infrastructure, and that’s not going to happen.
Systemic Data Protection Apathy
Marketeers are still often careless and short-sighted with data – we’re frequently presented with lists that are clearly of very dubious provenance, and while using low-quality data might give short-term gains, it proves highly destructive to a brand in the long-term.
While legislation against spam and for data protection has been steadily tightening, the UK has by far the most lax regime in Europe.
Smartmessages Takes Data Protection Seriously
We don’t want smartmessages to be part of the problem, so we take measures to keep quality up:
- Double-opt-in verification for all new subscriptions (where the subscriber has to respond to a verification email before they are added to a list or any of their data is exposed).
- Audit trails of all subscribes and unsubscribes.
- Templates ALWAYS have an unsubscribe link.
- Easy, instant unsubscribes.
- Subscribers can access their own data at any time, fulfilling data protection data subject access request requirements for data protection act compliance.
- Bouncing and spam-reporting addresses are maintained automatically and persistently – those addresses will be blocked from sending and prevented from resubscribing.
- Account-wide unsubscribes by default – someone unsubscribing from one list will be removed from all others in an account. This is especially helpful where an account holder is not careful about their own data management policies. For those that do pay attention, we can switch accounts to per-list unsubscribes.
- SPF and DKIM support. We never try to hide where we’re sending from, we don’t move, we digitally sign every message, even administrative ones.
- SSL encryption everywhere. All administrative, subscribe and unsubscribe pages are served over encrypted connections. Surprisingly, this is not yet a legal requirement, but it probably soon will be.
- Account holders with new lists are required to test list subsets before we allow full sends.
- Generally we don’t allow the use of bought-in lists, as nearly all those we’ve seen are blatantly illegally harvested, and a single spam-trap address can easily poison an entire list or worse. There are a few list providers that we’ve seen provide good data, and we’re happy to have them as partners.
These measures might sound onerous, but the only way to combat spam is with integrity. All this reflects on your customers – if you value them, they’ll return the favour.