On Friday, May 19, 2006, 3:08:23 PM, Greg Schuler wrote:
Hi Bill,
I appreciate your quick response. And I'm interested in what others on the mailing list might have to say about this as well.
Greg, You may want to subscribe:
http://lists.surbl.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
(I had to manually approve your message since you're not subscribed. You can unsubscribe at any time.)
In answer to your questions:
If you've assembled a live customer list with UBE for a few years, then stop sending UBE, doesn't that mean you get the benefits of that UBE even after you stop sending it?
I don't believe so. First, even though we didn't have a 100% closed-loop opt-in list process, most of the email we sent was not UBE. We only emailed names collected from what we believed were legitimate transactions on our partner web sites. The consumer was always presented with a privacy policy and terms of service that told them they would be agreeing to receive future email offers by completing the transaction. So while it wasn't perfect, we were making an effort to be sure the email we sent had the end-user's permission. We ultimately learned that this wasn't sufficient. The fact that we ended up with spam traps and other "bad" addresses in our email lists is proof that our process was flawed. So we decided to exit the email business in December, 2005. Had we continued to email "live customers" after that, then yes I suppose you could say we were still benefiting from past practices. But we didn't do that.
One way to definitively solve this kind of problem is to mail your existing addresses and ask if they still want to get mail. If they don't reply or say no, you remove them.
It's a pretty standard solution.
Have you considered that?
Jeff C. -- Don't harm innocent bystanders.