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MAAWG Condemns Email Appending ... All of It
9/20/11
By Ken Magill
The only surprise in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group’s statement last week condemning email appending was that it didn’t publish one sooner.
However, MAAWG’s implication that email appending can’t be accomplished without spamming is nonsense.
“The practice of email appending is in direct violation of core MAAWG values,” the group of email service providers and ISPs said in its statement. To drive the point home, MAAWG printed the line in bold type.
“MAAWG believes that permission is not transferable between marketing streams,” the statement continued. “When a user gives a company permission to market to him or her and provides a form of preferred contact, a company cannot assume this customer has consented to receive messages via email as well.”
Okay, but can they at least ask?
There are a number of good reasons so many marketers want to append email addresses to their postal files. The obvious one is email’s a lot cheaper than paper. Migrating customers from paper to email has clear benefits.
Also, multichannel customers buy more, and buy more often than single-channel buyers. Whether someone will start buying more because they’ve had an additional channel added for them is, of course, up for debate.
MAAWG went on to justify its condemnation of appending by explaining how sloppy the practice can be.
“[T]he data collected by email-appending service companies today is often error-prone,” the statement said. “Their practice of using various clues to determine an email address from publicly available information often leads to incorrect guesses. …
“Finally, there is evidence that current email-appending service companies mix opt-in data from users the service believes have agreed to be email-appended with non-opt-in data. This muddies the water and it is often hard for an otherwise innocent sender to determine until after it is too late.”
Fair enough. Stories of marketers getting burned by shady email appenders—EmailAppenders comes to mind—are legion.
But do they all operate that way?
If an appender has a large database of people who have agreed to receive email from it, matches what data it can, and sends requests from its own servers on the marketer’s behalf on an opt-in basis—meaning recipients must respond in order to be added to the marketer’s file—it’s a permission-based endeavor and violates nothing MAAWG stands for.
And, yes, I realize I could be living in Candy Land here.
But email appending in and of itself doesn’t violate MAAWG’s standards. It’s the way it is too often implemented that violates MAAWG’s standards.
However, admittedly it would have been a jaw dropper if MAAWG had made the above distinction.
Comments
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Date: 2011-09-26 15:28:07
Subject: Email APpenders
It's sad to see email appending getting a bad wrap. With our service, http://www.AutoAppender.com, we are sure to use 100% opt-in only email addresses, and we like to believe we're really helping marketing companies reach clients through multiple channels, for example maybe they didn't have or know their email address when they filled out the form in-store, or the retail location didn't have an internet dealership set up yet. Quoting from the article, "multichannel customers buy more, and buy more often than single-channel buyers." - seems like reason enough to try a service like this!
Date: 2011-09-21 05:31:48
Subject: It's about privacy and personal data permissions
I completely agree with Andrew and Ken - unsurprisingly...
Personally I'm not even sure it should be legal.
I personally don't believe the laws themselves are strict enough with data-controllers, especially those who sneak or force in a 3rd party opt-in and then go on and sell that address as an append or just a list forever. Because once you've given third party opt-in once, there is no way to go back to the original controller to stop them selling it, normally because there is no way to link future emails you get from anyone and everyone who buys email data to which data controller.
If someone uses an email append, the sender/data controller should at least be forced/compelled to announce the append source to allow a recipient to opt-out from that source sharing their data again as well as the brand doing the marketing;
Date: 2011-09-20 16:42:02
Subject: RE: That's not appending
Absolutely no issue with the scenario you described Ken.
I just do not think I would call that appending, that is a subscriber drive by email that is matched to current client data files, and I have seen something similar done before.
I am not sure how well the model would work commercially however, as that was a failure as I remember.
I do not think it is what is described as email appending though. MAAWG states that " permission is not transferable between marketing streams" and the scenario you described is not transferring permission, it is requesting explicit permission, explicitly requesting them to opt in. You are simply matching your client data across two companies/lists before requesting that permission. That is why I say it isn't email appending perse. That said I still believe it would be hard to make work.
Date: 2011-09-20 16:00:56
Subject: RE: That's not appending
An appending company once described that exact scenario to me as their business model. That's where the idea came from.
Date: 2011-09-20 15:48:57
Subject: Can I name one company?
Nope. That's why I didn't.
Hence, the Candy Land line.
Date: 2011-09-20 15:28:48
Subject: Candy Land.
Email appending certainly can be done without spamming, though I've never seen it done successfully. I've seen it tried (using exactly the approach you mention) but not in a way that made for a viable business.
When dealing with companies looking for loopholes a simplified statement that covers 99.99% of the possibilities is better than one that attempts to cover 100% by spending half it's time trying to explain the subtleties of that last 0.01%.
I could share some of the detailed discussions that were made about exactly this issue, were than not the sort of thing MAAWG prefers to keep non-public. But they happened, and everything you've suggested (and more) was considered.
In the case that a company sets up a way to do email appending that is both a) not spamming and b) a viable business model then I'm sure MAAWG would pay attention to that. I don't think it's likely to come up.
Date: 2011-09-20 15:28:33
Subject: Thats not appending
You are not discussing appending though ...
If company 'a' rents usage of its list to company 'b'. And company 'a' sends out a message on behalf of company 'b' offering them the opportunity to share email address details and subscribe to company 'b' mailing list. That is not appending.
Therefore there was no need for MAAWG to make the distinction. MAAWG is quite right appending is spamming plain and simple. If you want permission to use someones email address ask for it. That is what you have described. Company A has teh right to send the email as they have permission. Inviting that person to subscribe to company b.
As I understand it MAAWG is not saying you cannot collate customer data that you already have for a subscriber with their optin email subscription data.
Just because you have a snailmail postal subscriber does not mean you have the right to try and work out their email address of your own accord and start emailing them.
Date: 2011-09-20 15:28:31
Subject:
Can you name me one company that does things as you have described? (ie, send the opt-in on behalf of the marketers)
While we can all come up with scenarios where the appending is done with full permission, I haven't yet found anyone selling permission based appending.
It's hard to carve out an exception for something that no one actually does.