We automatically unsubscribe anyone who marks our users’ messages as spam.

If you’re also managing lists outside of AWeber and want to make sure that unsubscribes are removed from all of those lists, there are 2 steps I recommend:

1. Periodically export a list of your AWeber unsubscribes (this can be done at the "Leads" page) so you can remove those people from your outside lists

2. Do the same thing with people who unsubscribe from your non-AWeber lists and use the "Unsubscribe" page in your AWeber account to remove them from your list/s managed with us.

Our email address lists reside in multiple places, and we may try to send them something else, unless we can remove them from all our lists. Any suggestions?

I’ll be completely honest though. Before I began my list just a few months ago, I NEVER REALIZED that hitting the "SPAM" button had a potentially adverse affect on legitimate email marketers. When you are deleting over 100 SPAM mails at once, it’s easy to overlook evaluating each on a case-by-case basis.

I also bought into the belief that "unsubscribing" from true SPAM mail would just increase the amount I got. U’m not at all convinced this was the wrong strategy. Realistically, I’ve watched it happen–having "unsubscribed" from a SPAM mail only to later find my email box flooded with mail appearing to come from the same place.

Having an email address be valid is one thing, having the person on the other end of it verify that he or she READ the email is of great value to SPAMMERS. Let’s not forget that they aren’t caring to be ethical, right?

Regarding your question about .biz domain names.

To the best of my knowledge no ISP automatically categorizes a .biz domain name in a From: line or website URL as spam. I do know that the .biz domain name is extensively used by spammers for their own malicious activities.

As a percentage, spamming .biz domains to ones being legitimately used are much higher than .com this some spam filters may score a .biz messages as potentially "more likely to be spam". That’s just a small fraction of all the potential factors that lead an ISP to make a judgment call on a message being spam.

Some people do hit the “Spam” button in order to unsubscribe. After all, when they do, the message goes away, and they don’t get anything else from the sender, so for them what’s the difference between that and unsubscribing?

Now, just like you and I, ISPs do understand that a “Spam” button click doesn’t necessarily mean that the message was spam. However, it’s not practical for them to call everyone who lodges a spam complaint to ask who really wanted to lodge complaints, and who just wanted to unsubscribe.

So, they take many factors into consideration when determining:

* who is and is not sending unsolicited email
* how to handle incoming email.

The key here is that you are using Verified Opt-In, which gives you proof that subscribers did indeed request your information, and is going to result in your complaint rate being lower than if you were using single opt-in.

The short e-mails are intended to be less intrusive and burdensome than long winded brain dumps that most won’t read. Instead, they are simply a couple paragraphs that introduce a larger article on the site.

I get unsubscribes and some respond with a comment, which I appreciate since they were thoughtful enough to actually compose something. What drives me nuts is he one or two folks who choose to hit the "spam" button rather than the ‘unsubscribe’ link.

It’s not so much that someone hit the "spam" button, that gets me. I realize they probably simply view that button as the easiest way to stop the e-mail from hitting their ‘in-box’. What bugs me is that idea that the ISP interprets their use of the "spam" button as a vote against me in the spam wars.

My spam reports are pretty low; less than 1% of all mailings. Nonetheless, I think there is something amiss when the public interprets "spam" as something unwanted, or no-longer-wanted, and the industry applies the more narrowly tailored definition.

This begs the question of how closely to the ISPs scrutinize spam button complaints…

I’d be interested to know!

It seems to me a bit odd that just because it is a .biz it should be spam, I receive more spam from .com sites than from .biz!

Best regards and thanks for an excellent service, I have been a happy user for four days now.

An occasional spam complaint isn’t going to cause deliverability issues for you, but it’s important to minimize the occurrence of them and to protect yourself against any false complaints.

Our conversation here underscores the need to use Verified Opt-In to ensure that you have “affirmative consent” from all subscribers to email them at the address they’ve given you.
When using Verified Opt-In, a record of each person’s verification is stored in your AWeber account and is easily accessible via the “Search Leads” page.

I think there should be some kind of a campaign to explain about services like AWeber and why they are good for senders and the recipient. Maybe if people recognized the unsubscribe link as a legitimate company, they would just click the link instead of hitting spam. We could all help in this matter on our own web pages by explaing a little more about the "service" we use to send email. The ISP’s could do the most good by explaining about optin email as well. That goes double for AOL.