Not only has the report-spam button become one of the Internet service providers' top tools in the fight against spam, it's apparently had a dramatic civilizing effect on the relationship between legitimate, permission-based e-mail marketers and inbox providers.
Before the days of the ‘This is junk’ button, e-mail marketers whose messages were being blocked often would complain that their campaigns were being filtered capriciously.
With end users now deciding what is and isn't spam, the “But my file is 100% opt-in” argument no longer holds water. If recipients say it's spam, it's spam.
As a result, Laura Atkins, president of deliverability and ISP relations company Word to the Wise, credits the report-spam button as a key relationship changer between marketers and inbox providers.
“The ISPs — particularly the big ones, such as AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo! — have really stepped up and put their filtering techniques into the end user's hands,” she says. “That's convinced a lot of reputable marketers that when their mail is blocked, it isn't being blocked frivolously. There really is something wrong.”
And so, more and more, legitimate marketers experiencing delivery problems reportedly are looking to find and fix the cause rather than argue that there shouldn't be a problem in the first place.
