Continued from E-mail Newsletters – What Do You Do?

Spam Reports

Spam reports can really damage a sender’s reputation and even lead to suspension of their account so use unsubscribe unless you really were spammed!

This is what irks me. When someone who VOLUNTARILY opted in issues a spam report. This means they deliberately went out of their way and clicked the small link that says “report spam” instead of simply unsubscribing. This is highly irresponsible and maybe it even comes from laziness because clicking ‘unsubscribe’ might actually require you to do one more thing and enter your e-mail to be sure you are unsubscribed properly.

Now let’s be clear about what spam is.

Just because you receive a message and included in that message is an offer for something that costs money, does not make it spam. Since there are many places to go and different people will have different ideas about what or whom is an authority on the topic of spam I will offer a few definitions from a few different places:

Merriam Webster

: unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses

Here is an interesting one:

http://spam.abuse.net/overview/whatisspam.shtml

Webopedia

Webopedia also uses the word “unsolicited” in their definition.

In fact the point I would like to make is that I think the key word here is “unsolicited”. So when you sign up for my e-mail voluntarily, in other words I didn’t sign you up or add you, but you took the deliberate act of putting your e-mail in the box to your right where is says “Sign Up For Our E-mail Newsletter” that means the e-mails you get from me were IN FACT solicited by you. You signed up and asked me to send you the e-mail. So when you opt out via “spam report” YOU ARE LYING to constant contact and I can’t stand liars! Especially when this directly impacts me because Constant Contact takes this seriously. Luckily It only happens very rarely with my newsletter subscribers but it does happen and it always irks me because every single person on my list has opted in via form on the internet.

What are your thoughts? Do you send a newsletter out? How often? Please post your comments below.