At the risk of being sued, I’m prepared to state categorically that iContact promotes spam. I don’t say this lightly; rather, I make this assertion because I’m fed up with dealing with the spam that it’s members continue to foist on me. So, I’m writing this post to help all of you deal with it when it comes.
Most of us have good spam filters to weed out the majority of junk that arrives in our InBox. But, spammers have figured out how to get around that, and I’m afraid that until such time as the powers that decide on what is code is acceptable what is not change the rules, there will be very little that we can do about it.
In this case, the spammers are using iContact to distribute their tripe. Their able to do so because a) the email marketing company doesn’t require a double-opt-in sign up, and b) (and this is the real kicker) the senders place an asterisk ahead of the name they give in the “from” box. That asterisk makes it impossible to filter out what follows, because it is a kind of wild card. In other words, if you used in in your filter, it would prevent everything from getting to you.
You can’t prevent this stuff from arriving, but you can minimize the damage. Here’s how.
At the bottom of the email, click the link that says you want to “confirm to list.” This will bring you to another screen where you can manage your account. Click the link at the bottom, and then untick the box beside the name of the person who sent it to you. Be sure that you also tick the box next to the “Do Not Contact List.”
You will find that doing this is much more effective than deleting it or consigning the message to your spam folder. If you do either of those, you’ll keep getting them from that person. I’ve managed to dramatically reduce the number I get by following the method I’ve suggested.
It seems to me that iContact has a responsibility to fight spam, rather than promoting it. There are a couple of easy things that they could do. First, they could make it impossible for their customers to preface any box in their emails with an asterisk. The second, and equally responsible thing to do, would be to institute a policy where double-opt-ins were required.
In the absence of both of these suggestions, I recommend that you use a more respectable service, such as AWeber.
In my experience iContact do nothing about spammers that are reported to them. I’ve had email conversations with the iContact owners about specific spamming incidents. They promise to look into it, but 6 months later the same spammer is up and running on iContact.
They just don’t care.
Thanks, Bob, for your comments.
iContact is all over my traps. Complaining will get individual addresses removed, but the toxic list that they got the addresses from originally is still used. In industry parlance, this is called “list washing.”
This differs sharply like legitimate bulk mailers, e.g., Constant Contact or SimplyCast, who will delete entire lists that are found to contain any addresses that were not opt-in.
Dear Carl,
Many thanks for your comment. It’s unfortunate that we have both had the same bad experience from these people, but encouraging to know that it’s not all in our imagination.
Cheers, Bruce
Bruce, it appears that iContact has dramatically improved over the past six months. They’ve been moving aggressively to require customers to clean up their lists and ejecting the ones who continued to spam, even customers they’d had for years. (And, not surprisingly, some of those have now appeared on other ESPs.)
If you’re still having issues with spam from them, give their abuse desk another try and see how it goes.
Thanks for letting me know Carl.
My spam filters do a really good job. But at the time I made the post, I think I was getting stuff from all over, and every time I unsubscribed, iContact was the distributor behind it.
Maybe blogs actually make a difference to companies after all.