What is Spam?

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Justin Premick

We see and hear the word so often that you would think everybody knows and agrees what it is.

But is that really the case?

ISPs and email service providers commonly define spam as Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).

If you asked “what is spam?” to random people on the street, how often do you think you’d get that definition?

As more people use any word, they’re going to find new contexts to use it in. The word “spam” is no different.

In the Eye of the Recipient

I’ve heard the word “spam” used to describe information sent/received in a variety of ways:

SMS (cell phone text messages)
Comments on blogs, forums or sites such as MySpace
Direct (postal) mail
Phone calls

Now, this is a purely anecdotal observation, but it seems to me that the word “spam” is now being used by the general population to refer to information that is not wanted. Period.

The reasons it’s not wanted may vary:

The recipient has already gotten the information elsewhere
The information is sent too frequently or at the wrong time
The recipient is mad at the sender and doesn’t want to hear from him/her
The recipient doesn’t remember the sender

…but the point is, the recipient doesn’t want the information.

What’s This Got To Do With Your Email?

Let’s take that mentality and re-apply it to email. If someone doesn’t want your information, what do they do? They unsubscribe, right?

Or do they click the “Spam” button?

Step back and look at your email campaigns from the perspective of a subscriber:

Why have they come to you? Does what you send match what they expect?
How often do they hear from you? Is this too often? Too rarely?

Keep attuned to your subscribers’ wants, needs and perceptions of you. You don’t want them to lump you in with all of the “spammers” they hear from on and offline.

Tags: spam complaints

Print This Post

14 Responses

Samantha
November 10th, 2006 at 3:07 pm

Justin,

In an online forum, someone advised against repeating keywords(or keyword phrases) in your meta tags, as the spiders could consider it "spam." That completely threw me! This word is very malleable.

How does someone being mad at me or forgetting me and hitting "report spam" affect my status with aweber? Don’t you have a zero tolerance policy? Seems like sometimes it would be out of my control.

Thanks for yet another helpful post.
SONNY DINGER
November 10th, 2006 at 9:32 pm

THANK YOU FOR THAT NOTE ABOUT SPAM IT SEESS MAYBE AOL IS HAVING THE MOST PROBLEMS,MY COMPUTER GETS HUNG UP EVERY NIGHT. THANK YOU
SONNY SONYBESSIE@AOL.COM
No Spammer
November 12th, 2006 at 6:19 pm

I just got the complaints report with just few complaits, but I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do. Is there any statistics on a standard rate of people classifing you as spam?

What happens if those people that marked "spam" do not unsubscribe? Would the mail servers keep complaining?
Robert Oschler
November 13th, 2006 at 10:06 am

Yes but you should mention that some people just hit the spam button anyways, despite the fact they requested a subscription with double opt-in, even if the newsletter has *no* ads or sales pitches in it at all and is targeted solely to the subject they signed up for. I guess it’s easier than clicking the "unsubscribe" link. I think the ISP’s should require spam reports to have at least one coherent sentence explaining why they feel the report is spam. This sentence would then be forwarded anonymously to the list publisher (us). O, they should at least have a radio button set that lists the most common spam complaints which the user would click. That way we could send back evidence that the user’s complaint is frivolous.
Jamie Ratliff
November 13th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

I wish there was a magic solution too, but there doesn’t seem to be one yet. I think one problem is the old belief that if you clicked on the "unsubscribe" link, it verified the email address. People didn’t realize that invalid emails bounce back anyway, so the spammer didn’t need you to click anything to verify the address was good.

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.
Best Cooking Site
November 13th, 2006 at 2:21 pm

I think the ISPs make it way too easy to hit that SPAM button. People are using it as an easy way to unsubscribe. I think there needs to be a more effective system in place to recognize when a lead was opt-in, double-optin or not requested at all. Users that hit the SPAM button for no reason should lose credibility when the ISP considers their "vote" in blacklisting a website for SPAM.
Justin Premick
November 13th, 2006 at 2:44 pm

As several of you have noted, it is easy for people to lodge spam complaints against you, even though they have requested your information.

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.
Dan Sommer
November 14th, 2006 at 8:03 am

I have a question regarding spam; why does spam guards automaticly record a .biz website as spam? I was one of those who jumped of joy when suddenly I could get the domain name I needed when .biz came out.

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.
Chris Smith
November 16th, 2006 at 11:48 am

This has been my greatest annoyance with my e-mail list. No one goes on my list unless they submit their name, e-mail address, and then confirm their subscription. Once they do, they receive a series of short e-mails pointing them to educational articles on my site.

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!

-Chris
Justin Premick
November 16th, 2006 at 3:40 pm

Chris,

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.
Tom Kulzer
November 17th, 2006 at 5:59 pm

Dan,

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.
Scot McKay
November 22nd, 2006 at 2:36 am

Those of us who have lists tend to know what the strict guidelines are based on the consistent education we receive when we join AWeber, etc.

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?
Jan Naylor-Smith
November 27th, 2007 at 7:07 pm

I really appreciate all the info on this topic. Am I reading it correctly that when someone hits their spam button they somehow get unsubscribed? Or does their ISP block our future email to them? Or will they get next week’s auto-responder message and click spam again?

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?
Justin Premick
November 28th, 2007 at 8:33 am

Jan,

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.