Like, sure, maybe the people you're trying to send email to are already customers, or they're otherwise really interested in hearing what you have to say, and maybe that's what they all tell themselves. But "tips for disguising your unsolicited commercial email as legitimate communication so you can succeed in shoving it into people's inboxes" feels like it'd take a lot of reality distortion to not feel guilty about.
Am I just naive? A Hacker News sheep living on grass while the wolves feast on red meat? Is there such a thing as being a conscientious objector for spamfucking people with trashy ads and sales pitches?
See, get a lot of unsolicited shitmail at work that gets through spam filters. So yay for your delivery checklist, enabling interruptions and annoyance.
Here comes the fun part. About half don’t comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. So, what do now is make my own, which is a reply with this:
“The CAN-SPAM Act is a law that sets the rules for commercial email and establishes requirements for commercial messages, including the right for recipients to stop receiving emails[1][2][3][4][5][6]. The Act applies to any commercial electronic message to U.S. recipients, including transactional and marketing messages[4][5]. To comply with the Act, commercial emails must provide recipients with a clear and obvious mechanism to opt-out of receiving further emails, and they cannot include misleading subject lines or inaccurate information in the header fields[4][6]. Additionally, commercial emails must include a physical mailing address in the body of the email, and an address where unsubscribe requests can be physically mailed[4]. Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $43,792, so non-compliance can be costly[4].
Citations: [1] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act... [2] https://www.fcc.gov/general/can-spam [3] https://www.mirabelsmarketingmanager.com/blog/how-to-comply-... [4] https://www.practicalecommerce.com/quick-refresher-of-u-s-ca... [5] https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/insights/legal/practica... [6] https://www.unsubcentral.com/2023/04/26/can-spam-compliance-...
If they email me even once more, I now send them a bill for the minutes I was interrupted at my attorney hourly rate. If they reply they aren’t paying, then comes the violation penalty threat.
Yeah, that’s how much I don’t want your ad in my inbox.
The only thing missing is reverse DNS lookup capabilities, and maybe the MTA-STS DNS records (which I might have overlooked).
In my case I had to switch the provider my domains were kept at, because their DNS setup there didn't allow to maintain reverse DNS zones.
I am mentioning this specifically, because without it you land in the spam folder for Outlook users, no matter the rest.
Of course you could run any spam operation on Azure without any validation mechanism and still bypass their spam filters with those IP ranges instead...
MTA-STS is also quite important because if the other MTA supports it, they will always enforce SSL/TLS usage without all that STARTLS crap.
Edit: oh, and DNSSEC. Without it, a lot of those verification URL scraper mechanisms will downgrade your domain reputation real quick.
Then everyone wins. Perfect delivery for the lists and perfect unsubscribe for the receivers. And more of an explicit opt i too!
Yes, from a marketing perspective this is fine. But you should warn about it.
If you need to push your marketing onto users by clickbaiting them or using shady practices like starting it with "hey, this is Anne, ...", or spamming them outright (multiple emails a day), then maybe its utterly fucking irrelevant.
Dont use my full name in marketing emails, dont go "<Full name>, how to ...", and for the live of god dont use emojis in your subject.
If your email is irrelevant, please dont send it.
One more point to add: if you sre collecting the details of EU residents, read up on and obey the GDPR, otherwise it may get very expensive. This goes way beyond just not sending spam, you need to have a compliant privacy policy, use data only for the purposes you collected them for, publish full contact details, etc.
