Spammers Are Not Welcomed Here
By Ron 4 November 2008 under sendcube RantsSince our launch, we have encountered many potential spammers who tried their luck at using sendcube as their spam tool. This post is dedicated to talk about these users and how we are very intolerant towards this kind of behavior in sendcube.
First of all, let me be very clear here. sendcube is a permission-based email marketing system. We have checks in place to ensure sendcube does not fall prey to spammers who send out spam emails, or as some call them in a less negative way, “unsolicited emails”, although we still prefer to call them spam anyhow - a rose is a rose is a rose.
We tell all our customers that all batch imports of subscriber lists will be manually approved by our delivery team, and we really walk the talk. We have real humans looking through the lists to spot out any tell-tale signs of unacceptable lists and perform checks on their email practices. Admittedly, this is a very tedious (and at times inconvenient) process but is a necessary evil in order to ensure that the system is not being abused and that those marketers using sendcube who practice permissible email marketing are protected. This is a very important aspect for us to be able to maintain a high reputation of our service.
That said, we have also encountered users who tried different methods to circumvent the checking process that we have in place. One prime example is signing up as paid customers and demanding that we approve the lists regardless of the sources, simply on the mere basis that they have already paid up. Guess what? That’s not the way we function. We clearly state in our Terms of Use and our Anti-Spam Policy that we will monitor and stop any suspicious spamming activities. So it’s just wishful thinking that we will let your lists through as long as you have paid. Sure, signing up as a paid customer does in itself show a certain level of commitment on the part of the customer that his/her email marketing practices are acceptable by sendcube, but there are still many factors in our approval process that will look at the overall picture, rather than just the fact that he/she has paid up.
Now, some would-be customers might start to worry that if their lists do not get approved after they have signed up for our paid plans, they stand to lose their subscription fees. To these customers, we would like to assure that as long as you have proof that you have obtained your list under acceptable conditions as stated in our policies, chances are your list will get approved. In any case, we always advise that you test drive sendcube first by signing up for a Trial account, importing your lists, and testing out the functions before making the jump. That way, not only can you be certain that your list has been approved, but you also get to check out the rest of sendcube to see if we are a fit to your email marketing needs.
I’m going to end this post off with an actual case we had with a paid customer whom we found to have uploaded a subscriber list that showed characteristics of a bought, rented or “scraped” list. Instead of offering information on the source of the list, he counter-questioned “But you are not a US-based company, why should you be worried about spam?”
Our reply to this is that regardless of where you may be based, we believe permission-based email marketing is the only really healthy way to run your email marketing campaigns. This may come across as being a handicap than a feature for many marketers who are still clueless about why respect for their subscribers is of utmost importance, but this is one aspect of sendcube that we are proud of and will not budge; we would rather have fewer customers than have too many spammers abusing the system.
