Sep 2, 2008 2:15 PM , by Ken Magill

 

Man oh man, did Dylan Boyd over at TheEmailWars have a cow over last week’s Barack Obama e-mail story, or what?

His rant taking me to task for signing up for Obama’s e-mail messages using the name “Stupid Poopyhead” also spawned a lively discussion over at deliverability consultant Laura Atkins’ blog Word to the Wise.

In the Obama piece, I recounted how I tested a flaw in his e-mail sign up form—it lets anyone sign up anyone’s e-mail address with any name and fails to verify the signup—by using the juvenile name “Stupid Poopyhead.” Obama’a campaign e-mails have been addressing me as “Stupid” ever since.

I used the name “Stupid Poopyhead” to test a report by anti-spammer Ed Falk on his blog The Spam Diaries that someone had been signing anti-spammers’ e-mail addresses to Obama’s file with fake, insulting names. I used the obviously fake, juvenile name to see if anyone in Obama’s camp was eyeballing new registrants’ names, or if maybe they had some gizmo in place to catch clearly false ones. They’re not. They don’t.

In last week’s piece, I also joked that since becoming Obama’s vice presidential running mate, Joe Biden was also addressing me as “Stupid” and that since we aren’t on a first-name basis, as Barack and I apparently are, Biden should refer to me as “Mr. Poopyhead” until I tell him otherwise.

Ha ha.

But Boyd did not like the joke—not one bit. With data integrity and e-mail deliverability being such difficult issues, he wrote, he believed I was setting a bad example by polluting Obama’s e-mail file.

To which I politely say: “bullsh*t.”

I didn’t pollute Obama’s file. His campaign has my real e-mail address. What I polluted was his personalization engine. I did so because I could and it’s his e-mail list manager’s fault that I was able to do so. I did it as a simple test and thought the result was funny. I still think it’s funny. Moreover, his messages are getting delivered. There was no harm done.

Someone else, however, could easily use the Obama campaign’s sloppy signup mechanism to pollute his file beyond use. It’s a wonder it hasn’t already been done.

And there’s a lesson here for marketers: They should stop kidding themselves and use so-called double opt-in—or fully verified opt-in, or closed-loop opt-in, or whatever you want to call it—in their e-mail list-building efforts, or they shouldn’t be surprised when they end up with a lot of crap addresses.

Double opt-in—I am purposely using this term rather than the others because it’s the one marketers use most and, more importantly, it drives anti-spammers nuts—is the one foolproof way to make sure e-mail addresses people use to sign up for a list are real and accurate.

Under double opt-in, the marketer sends a confirmation message to new registrants to which they must respond in order to be added to the file. Forged subscription? Bad or mistyped address? No problem. There will be no response to the confirmation message, and as a result, no garbage data entered into the file.

As I write this, I am not sure whether Magilla Marketing’s publisher Penton Media uses double opt-in or not. Alas, if only I were in charge of everything, all would be perfect, no? We’d at least drink a lot more.

In any case, is it harder to build a file using double opt-in? Without a doubt. Some people sign up their e-mail addresses and have second thoughts. The verification e-mail may get diverted to the recipient’s spam folder, and he or she may not see it. Or he or she may not see it in their inbox. Or he or she may see it, but get distracted by something else in their inbox and then forget to respond.

All these things can and do go wrong with double opt-in, but the risks of not using it have simply become too great. For one thing, if a marketer gets blacklisted by, say, Spamhaus, and the mailer is not using double opt-in, the folks at Spamhaus will force the issue.

On the plus side, marketers using double opt-in don’t get blacklisted by Spamhaus because they never hit Spamhaus’s traps—fake e-mail addresses set up to catch spammers.

Also, fake signups are nothing to get worked up about. They are simply a fact of e-mail list building that the marketer must guard against or accept the inevitable consequences. It is solely up to mailers to keep their lists clean, and no one else.

And the possibility of a marketer who fails to use double opt-in building a polluted list is real.

For example, Spamza—run by a 14-year-old kid, for all we know—recently launched a Web site on which users could register e-mail addresses and an automated system would go around the Internet signing the addresses up for every e-mail newsletter it could find that had no new-subscriber verification mechanism.

Fortunately, Spamza’s Web host shut it down, but it is simply one example of the carnage possible for marketers who don’t verify their signups by requiring an affirmative response to a new-subscription verification message.

And in any case, why not use the verification message to offer new subscribers a killer deal of some sort and get them interacting with the brand right away?

With spam complaints being one of the top metrics inbox providers use to determine whether or not incoming messages are wanted, the illusion of a larger e-mail list that results from failing to use double opt-in isn’t worth the risk of having people on the file who may not want to be there.

The choice is simple: A marketer can decide not to use double opt-in and have the illusion of a larger file, or they can use double opt-in and have a clean, responsive file that results in fewer delivery issues.

And in the case of personalized messages, marketers who use double opt-in won’t be calling anyone “Stupid Poopyhead” who doesn’t want to be addressed that way.

Read More from Ken at Directmag.com