Company hit with $1.1M penalty under Canadian anti-spam rules
canadianlawyermag.com
canadianlawyermag.com
On both occasions I was receiving emails/spam I never signup for, and on both occasion I tried (several times) to contact the sender directly asking to be unsubscribed. Neither responded to my emails (and I've tried various different email addresses).
When the path of least resistance is filling a complaint, senders should expect no less. And if you decide to spam people, make it easy to unsubscribe, because the next fastest option is to file a complaint, and fines don't come cheap.
They ask to send them the spam emails (with headers) to them, all communication from and to. I guess it's the same around the EU, just the relevant national agency.
1. I make an account on their service, or buy something. 2. There is no newsletter signup box. 3. They send me lots of newsletter emails. 4. They often keep coming after unsubscribes.
I consent to transactional emails, but I'm not consenting to newsletter and marketing emails. It's spam. I hope laws like this help deter such behavior.
Meanwhile, I've been marking non-consented emails as "spam" in gmail. If enough people do this, the companies will get blacklisted, which is another form of deterrence.
I have yet to find a single person who actually appreciates the emails LinkedIn sends them. That includes business people who got their job through LinkedIn, and the recruiters who use it.
When it gets to the point when TV shows are casually taking jabs at LinkedIn for their abusive email policy, I think that's a sign that they're not wanted. Anywhere.
Edit: To clarify, the recently released Simpsons episode poked fun at LinkedIn, as has John Stewart (multiple times), and John Oliver.
Usually, emails I don't ever click on or explicitly mark as spam end up in my spam box automatically. Gmail is smart enough to do that. Even Quora emails land directly in the spam box.
Not so for LinkedIn. I've never clicked through on an email from LinkedIn. I don't even have a profile on the site - just an account that's sitting empty.
Yet, all emails still land in my inbox.
I wonder why...
All LinkedIn email is banned at my gateway. As is any vendor who considers me purchasing from them to be an agreement whereby they can send me unsolicited email. 0 tolerance.
I have notification "fatigue" as it is and I don't need my attention drawn once a week to an email "ding" from a company I tried once.
If I were creating a new service I'd explicitly state on the signup prompts that I will not be send you marketing material, or at least have a checkbox.
Wishful thinking. The law in Canada, to my understanding, says that if you have conducted business with someone, then it's fair game for them to contact you with offers for some period of time (either 6 months or 12; I can't remember which.) Spam is defined as unsolicited bulk mail. If you bought something or subscribed to a site or whatever, then it's not unsolicited regardless of any opt-in or opt-out mechanism. The "do not call" registry of phone numbers similarly only applies to unsolicited callers; companies you've done business with can spam you with calls if you give them your phone number.
For these throwaway subscribes and transactional e-mails, I use an e-mail of them form <user>.<pin>@<mydomain>. When my mail server receives mail for this pattern, it changes it to <user>@<mydomain>, and bypasses all filters. Thus I'm sure to get important transactional e-mail. From time to time, and when I start seeing spam, I simply change the value of <pin>, which is a global in my mail server's config file.
Some people have date-based approaches, which can work well. E.g. if it is March 2015, your mail server might recognize an e-mail of the form you.201503@yourdomain, and map it to you@yourdomain. When April comes around, it stops working.
e.g.
cole.christensen+hnspam@gmail.com
And when mail from that source becomes troublesome setup a filter based on that To: address.
Maybe the problem you're running into is that the + character is special in URL's and must be escaped, otherwise it is treated as the representation of a space character. E.g. the URL parameter in <http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob+whatever@domain> looks, after URL decoding by the server, like "bob whatever@domain". The software which inserted the e-mail into the URL didn't treat the plus properly, but the software which is decoding the URL is treating it like it is supposed to.
If that's the issue, the workaround could be as simple as manually fixing the URL in your browser, replacing the unescaped + character with its percent-encoding equivalent, %2B, as in <http://foo.example.com?unsubscribe&bob%2Bwhatever@domain>. The URL parameter bob%2Bwhatever@domain should now decode into bob+whatever@domain.
Try it next time.
It's easy to see how this could happen because the insertion of e-mail addresses into unsubscribe links in e-mail bodies is done by ad-hoc software probably cobbed together in house, whereas whereas URL parsing is done by generic URL handling code in a web server.
(But anyway, the whole point of this exercise is that we don't trust the unsubscribing. If unsubscribing could be trusted to be honored, we wouldn't need this extraneous e-mail address that we can recognize and junk.)
You could not, for instance, widely publicize your "plus armored" gmail address in ways that make it susceptible to harvesting, and the scheme won't safeguard against situations where that e-mail address, once given legitimately, ends up sold to spammers.
Basically, everyone should have their own mail domain with a different trick. :)
Here is something you can do to bootstrap your own trick: make a "plus armored" gmail address your main one. For instance "bob.smith+rocks@gmail.com", such that "bob.smith@gmail.com" is considered invalid and thrown to the bit bucket. Do not give the "+rocks" version to anyone other than close contacts. Since "rocks" is a personal suffix, a spammer who has the address "bob.smith+junk003@gmail.com" cannot guess that "junk003" must be replaced with "rocks".
My email address isn't Fort Knox. Email I don't want just doesn't get past the spam filters; even at peak spam a few years back when I was getting 4000+ illicit messages a month. Complex schemes aren't going to benefit me any because despite publicly posting my email as above, I just don't have a problem with unwanted messages.
Meaning that the next time Compu-Finder will quietly hire a one-man shop in some other country and it will just spam on their behalf. It will be nearly impossible to (legally) pin this on them, because of the possibility that it was a hostile move on part of their competitors. Spammers gonna spam, just from a non-Canadian IP.
Most office workers know about "ACF Management" in Quebec because of the relentless spam and I'm not surprised they're the first hit by CASL. It's like the law was made for them.
Investigating into this, I learned that you can set up SQS queues for SES bounces or complaints. Complaints? Yeah, SES somehow gets information back when you hit the "Spam" button in gmail. An acceptable complaint rate is below 0.1%, and if you go above it you can get banned from SES, from other emailing services like Mandrill, or if you're emailing directly to ISPs they can block you at their level.
So hit those spam buttons! Make email senders pay for bad email!
(My story had a happy ending-- I cleaned up what segment of users my company is sending service emails to and now our bounce rate is below 5% like it should be.)
This is called FBL (feedback loop)[1]. It's a standard[2] adhered to by all of the bulk message senders (SES, Mandrill, marketing providers like Mailchimp, Emma, etc) and the big account providers like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. When you hit the "report spam" button that triggers an FBL message back to the Return-Path address in the message. Complying with FBL reports is super important to staying on the account providers' good sides.
Thank you for the link to the wikipage, I didn't know about FBL. It's disappointing that the page can't provide more information on how feedback loops are established between mailbox providers though.