For a good use of the Newsletter. Stop intensive commercial mailing

Jerome Granados on Friday, November 14th 2008 I 2 Comments

For a good use of the Newsletter. Stop intensive commercial mailing
For some weeks, we're encounting a burning issue concerning the newletters.  
We had to take it in charge in a rush.

Some clients use the newsletter system for commercial mailing. This really
is a problem that leads to annoyances for the whole WM community.

The technichal consequences of this.

The wrong use of the Newsletter service has bad effects. Indeed, some buy  
corrupted mail bases.
On some bases, we've been returned a 80% mails (for an exemple, on 60 000
mails sent, our servers had been returned 40 000 mails)

Our mail servers are setted up to try to send the mails again for a week.
This set up is totally normal, because the adresse mail sever can be
temporaly unavailable.
However, this makes sense only if the regitered person on the data base has
validated his registering by opt-in, in other words, the person agreed to
receive the newsletter.
Those adresses has a valid email adress.

But in intensive mailing campaigns, this can lead to a disaster, because
the tentatives to send the wrong-adress mails again delay all the
newsletter being sent.

Worse, we've had to step in on the servers, in the middle of the night, to
clean the repetitive sends of the newsletters.

Consequently, we've dealt with the most urgent, modifying the set up rules
of our servers.

We've shifted and re-installed all the servers that could, because of the
slow downs, perturbate the good working of the websites.
We've also worked on other ways to limit the impact of those mailings on WM
other users who utilise correctly the newsletter service.

Those problems have consequences for all of you because hotmail doesn't
accept mails from our servers anymore. We've been blacklisted.
This means that none newsletter sent to an hotmail adressee will reach its
destination anymore. The mail is directly rejected.

More than the technic problem, it also has to deal with french law

Here's what stipulates the law about numeric economy (French law that  
applies to us), the LCEN.

Extract from the article 22:"Direct prospecting by electronic mail is
authorised only if the adressee information has been given directly from
him,
respecting the n°78-17 January 6th 1978 law dispositions concerning
computer science, files and liberties, when selling or delivering services,

if the direct prospecting concerns similar products or services provided by
the same physical person or artificial person, and if the adressee is being
offered,
directly, without being ambiguous, the possibility to oppose, without any
cost besides the onces that go with the transmition of the refusal, and by
a simple way,
to the use of his information when it is collected and anytime an
electronic mail is sent to him."

In clear, that means that buying data bases is an infraction.

Measures taken to limit the abuses.

The Newsletter service is a priority for us. It's a very popular service  
among all WMaker users.
Here's the technical measures we will apply to prevent the abuses and come
back to a normal functonning:

1°) Hotmails are not accepted anymore registering, a warning message will
ask your visitors to give another email that's not hotmail.

2°) We'll create one base of corrupted emails for the WMaker application.
When a mail returns false more than twice, it will be banished from our
newsletters databases.

From a commercial point of view, we don't want to play the part of an email campaign service

We just want to propose as a complement of your information website, an  
integrated newsletter system, simple and efficient.

Concerning the e-mailing campaigns, a lot of professional services are
available. They notably permit the French firms to prevent law risks.
Even exist technic solutions that work in SaaS mode (Software as a
Service), just as we do.
Here's for an exemple some of them, specialized in it:

http://www.sendcube.com
http://www.campaignmonitor.com

Count 1 cents a sent newsletter, 400$ for 50 000 Newsletters.

The right side

Besides the problems of abuses on the newsletter service, we're aware that  
little technic problems concerning this service remain, notably with the
newsletter display on webmails.

Using the Design Object technology in the newsletters, we wanted to give
the same power and flexibility of use to this service as we did with the
whole backoffice of your site.
This leads to display problems in webmails because they refuse style
sheets.

On this stage, this force us to generate a different HTML code if the
newsletter is sent in yahoo, gmail... for an exemple.

When abuses are limited, we'll solve the display problems with your
newsletters in webmails.




Vos commentaires

1.Posted by Esteban Rubiales on 12/03/2008 6:53 PM | Alert
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I support your measures against SPAMMERS, but I think you should have stored our suscriptors hotmail accounts somewhere instead of just deleting them.

Now I could have solved the problem by creating a Google Group distribution list to add the deleted hotmail addresses and would have suscribed just the @googlegroup.com account to the newsletter. Google Group allways checks if members really want to recieve e-mails.

I'm afraid now it's too late to do it... ¿isn't it?

2.Posted by Jerome Granados on 12/03/2008 6:58 PM | Alert
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Hi Esteban,
Use the support interface to tell us for which website you want the hotmail email address file.
Thanks
Jerome

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