so... your customers were paying a third party to block you, so rather than working with your customers to figure out what the problem was, you threaten to sue the third party.
I'm an Amazon customer. If Amazon can't reach my gmail address because Google started using some third party filtering service, what exactly would you expect me to do? Even if I had the ability, I certainly don't have the inclination to spend time resolving this issue. I'll go so far as to mark something "not spam", but that's about it. The cost to me of not hearing from Amazon is virtually zero. The cost to Amazon of not being able to communicate with all its customers that use gmail is huge. It's an Amazon problem, not a customer problem.
But GP did figure out what the problem was and took steps to resolve it without involving lawyers before finally issuing the C&D and getting an injunction.
Glib, yes. Obtuse? less so.
>I'm an Amazon customer. If Amazon can't reach my gmail address because Google started using some third party filtering service, what exactly would you expect me to do?
If your free email address doesn't receive mail you want, I expect you might move to a different mail service. I think that if you want anything but automated support out of a free service, you are expecting far too much. Because you still seem to think sticking with your free email provider is the only reasonable course of action, I can only assume that said free provider is meeting your needs; that the automated support is good enough and that you don't mind the odd false positive.
Sure, if you want service, you are going to have to pay a few dollars, but there are plenty of spamfiltering services that are fairly cheap that do have a real person who will fix it if you tell them you aren't getting legitimate mail.
In reality, users consider "legitimate" newsletters to be spam... spending a bunch of time digging through the "legitimate sender" settings to get the mail you want and not the "legitimate newsletters" is often so much work that users just mark the newsletters as spam, and hope their provider will figure it out. Of course, this works really badly when it comes to reputation systems, as the billing stuff and the "newsletters" often come from the same server.
(really, if you must send "newsletters" in addition to your billing, you should do them from a different mailserver and different email address.)
more problems for people who send bulk email, sure...
the senders of bulk email vastly overestimate how much of a problem that is for end users.
And... this is exactly the point. If the filtering company works for the end user, and the end-user doesn't want the mail (or at least doesn't care if it doesn't get delivered) - then the filtering company should block it.
My point here is that you don't have a fundamental right to my attention. If I'm paying someone to sort my messages for me, and they throw out a message that is important to you, but that I don't really want to see... as far as I am concerned, the filtering company has done it's job.
(obviously, if I want that email, it's another matter entirely - see my other response.)
In fact, we learned of the problem when customers suddenly began to complain that they weren't receiving their password reset emails from us.
Our customers have email accounts with providers like Comcast. Comcast uses a third-party filtering service to handle spam.
So, our customers had no knowledge of the third-party, and some contacted our support staff to question why they weren't receiving our emails.
And, of course we attempted to identify the problem with the third party. If you read more carefully, you'll find that in my comment. Only after they insisted their classification was correct and refused to remove us from the list did we explore our legal options.
My point here is that the recipients of the email and the senders of the email have very different ideas as to what constitutes a "correct evaluation." - and in this case, it's the recipient who matters, so complaints from senders of email should be simply ignored by spam-filtering companies. Now, if the recipients can't complain, that's a problem, but it's not like people don't have a choice of email providers.
>recipients of the email and the senders of the email have very different ideas
What does that mean? They sign up for our service and expect to get e-mails from us, which they don't receive. We have the same "idea", but the third-party is interfering with that "idea".
>if the recipients can't complain, that's a problem
I will repeat that by definition of the business model, the recipients don't complain to the third-party because they have no knowledge that the third-party even exists.
>but it's not like people don't have a choice of email providers
Even if recipients did know about the third party, do you know the switching costs of e-mail? And, you're suggesting that we should wait until all of our affected members get fed up and change providers (hoping that provider doesn't use the same service, etc.)? All of this, when the problem is obviously being caused by the third-party's error, yet they have no responsibility?
Sorry, but of course the third-party is absolutely compelled to provide some recourse for legitimate senders that are mis-classified. Too hard with all the spammers out there, you say? Sorry. Pick another business.
That's not quite how it works from the end-user's perspective.
Say I buy a product or service from you. Of course, you send me billing emails, etc. and that's fine.
The problem is that companies take this further and start thinking they have the "right" to send all sorts of garbage to that customer.
Now, they of course let the customer opt out... if the customer is willing to spend ten minutes digging through their interface. But most don't.
I know you love those newsletters; they make you money. But don't kid yourself that your customers do. Many are going to click 'report spam' if you send too many. Even if it's not spam by the definition that marketers use, it's still very clearly unwanted email, and marking it as spam is so much easier than going through the unique-to-you opt-out procedure. And if your list is like most, some of the members signed up years ago (or bought something from you years ago) and long ago forgot doing so, so of course they are going to mark it as spam.
If you want to send email to your customers, you need to understand this.
Note, I'm not saying that you can't send that email; you can. I send email to my customers, and some of it borders on being "newsletters" - I'm just saying that you need to be aware of the cost- that cost is that it will annoy some of your users. Getting your email marked as spam is only one part of that cost.
>Even if recipients did know about the third party, do you know the switching costs of e-mail? And, you're suggesting that we should wait until all of our affected members get fed up and change providers (hoping that provider doesn't use the same service, etc.)? All of this, when the problem is obviously being caused by the third-party's error, yet they have no responsibility?
My point is that third party has no responsibility to you. They have a responsibility to their customers, but none to you.
I do agree with you on principle. We've been doing this for over a decade and have learned best practices. We also know what our customers appreciate and are very mindful of content, frequency, etc.
But, you seem to be overlooking a key point, so I will state it for at least the third time: the problem was NOT the content, and it was NOT being marked as spam by recipients. Instead, we were erroneously classified by the service as sending to honeypot addresses and/or defunct addresses. So, your assumptions about our customers, newsletters, etc. are just not relevant here.
>the third party has no responsibility to you. They have a responsibility to their customers...
Their customers complained to us that they weren't receiving our emails, so they weren't serving their customers very well in this instance either.
But, what you really don't seem to be getting is that they do have a responsibility not to harm us. That's why there is a legal cause of action known as "tortious interference". I sincerely don't know how to make that point any clearer. Perhaps researching that term a bit might help.
Yes, yes, reading up on that is probably a good idea. I am not a lawyer... but in the case of a mail-filtering company blocking emails that their customers have asked them to block, they are harming the senders of those mails. That is a direct result of what their customers are paying them to do.
Or ad-block programs- really, it's exactly the same thing; what the ad-blocker does for the user does harm the advertisers. There's many, many places in the free market where helping one side of a transaction hurts the other.
That probably means that "tortious interference" is more complex than you are making it out to be. There are a lot of situations where helping one party necessarily hurts another, and helping one party over the other is generally not illegal.
Neither is it "exactly" nor even remotely the same as ad blockers.
>That probably means that "tortious interference" is more complex than you are making it out to be.
No, it means that your analogies are invalid. Further, perhaps you should look up the term before musing about what it "probably means".