Even through the most robust testing, we’ll never be able to identify every inactively scenario or motivation, or for that matter remedy it. We can only make smarter assumptions. Right? But I can say, with absolute certainty, that it is blanket assumptions that keep many email programs from reaching their full potential, whether that’s due to impaired deliverability or impaired sales.

When mailers say "I just want to tell as many people as I can about my great idea" that is spam. Sending mail people didn't ask for and don't want is poor social behaviour on the internet. Adding someone to an advocacy list because they signed a petition is poor practice, generates complaints and causes blocking. Not just at NJABL, but at ISPs that actually listen to their users and let recipient feedback drive filtering decisions.

I also think that the people who make blocking decisions for large organizations understand a lot more about what choices they are making than you give them credit for. Sure, there are people running small mailservers that will use any blocklist without understanding what they're doing. But when you're talking large organizations they actually measure performance. One of those measures is: how much mail are we blocking that our users want. If the recipients don't tell the ISP your mail is wanted (either by complaining to their ISP that they're not getting mail they asked for or moving mail out of their spam/bulk folder) then the ISP is going to rightly treat that mail as unwanted.

Again, the issue is not the speech. The blocks are not done because of what you are saying. The blocks are based on behaviour. If advocacy groups act like spammers, then they'll be treated like spammers. If they stop spamming and start sending mail to people who want it, then the blocking issues go away.

Nobody's "rights are being compromised" over a spamblock implemented by a private entity. Never, ever. BY DEFINITION, this cannot happen. It's not possible. That's not how Constitutional rights apply in this scenario.

A lot of political and advocacy email campaigns feel that they don't need to behave ethically, and don't need to care about whether their recipients want to receive their email and instead fall back on "it's protected speech". That didn't work for sound trucks and noise control statutes, and it's not going to work for spam.

A little background: Much of the email advocacy groups send deal with educating and mobilizing people with respect to policy issues before Congress and other government bodies. These emails are fundamentally "political speech" as referred to in the 1st Amendment. This is why government ban and restrictions on SPAM do not apply to such communications. They are protected free speech.

That said, no advocacy organization wants to the be the judicial test case for such a claim. For that reason, and out of respect for people on their email lists, advocacy groups (with few exceptions), comply with the CAN-SPAM. Advocacy Groups rely on opt-in, provide a physical address, and an easy unsubscribe link.

The instigation for my initial tweet was that I learned NJABL.org was blacklisting organizations that did not use a double opt-in process.

An important way most advocacy organizations grow their lists is by running advocacy campaigns where taking the action also signs you up for their email list. As a rule, this sign up process is fully disclosed on the action form. There are several advocacy campaign services that work this way, including Salsa, Capwiz, and Convio.

The other side of the equation is that organizations and ISPs that use blackisting services don't always fully appreciate who is being blacklisted. Indeed, some blacklisting services include other blacklisting services filters within their own, making it even harder to understand who is being blackisted and way.

While I fully appreciate that private companies can blacklist anyone they want, it strikes me as problematic on a practical, if not ethical level, to blacklist groups exercise protected political speech in such a blanket way.

I am not advocating banning the practice of blacklisting such groups, but rather suggesting it is important for people to better understand what is being blacklisted and why. If people have the right to freely express political views and those views are being blocked in a way that is obscured by the layering of blacklists or the difficulty in understanding who is blacklisted, that raises concerns in my mind.

In the end, I am all for ensuring that email is protected from abusers. I just don;'t want to see that net cast too broadly such that it compromises our rights.

I hope this helps to clarify things.

And again, many thanks to you, Al, and Mark for taking the time to discuss this with me.

Thanks!

Testing is the only way to see if your strategy is a good one. Some tests are easy to do, some are hard, but you cannot let inertia dictate any part of your marketing efforts.

Addresses are abandoned all the time. People set up an account for one reason or another and they stop checking it. Usually this is their "commercial" or "subscription" account. It could be a lot of the places they subscribed to sold their address and they can't sort out spam from subscriptions. Or it could just be that they are tired of that address. But, in any case, there is no one at that email address.

ISPs tend to give a 6 – 12 month period before actually rejecting mail to abandoned addresses, but they do measure mail to inactive addresses as part of reputation scores. Blindly mailing to folks who aren't there isn't a good strategy.