After more than a year of legal maneuvers and often tough negotiations, Harris Interactive has been removed from the Mail Abuse Prevention’s Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) of alleged spammers.
Harris, which conducts market research through the Internet, was released from the list last Friday after agreeing to conform to MAPS’ standard of 100% confirmed, or double opt-in, e-mail marketing on its file of 7 million panelists.
Rochester, NY-based Harris filed a lawsuit in New York against MAPS in July 2000 after the Redwood City-based anti-spam group listed Harris on its RBL. The RBL is monitored by numerous large and small Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that block transmissions to those listed. At the time, e-mail delivery was blocked to 2.7 million of Harris’ online panelists.
Following independent agreements reached by Harris with the majority of its ISPs — including Microsoft’s Hotmail and America Online — 98% of its communications to its panelists was restored and Harris dropped the lawsuit last September. The remaining 2% of mail that continued to be blocked led to the lengthy negotiations with MAPS before ending in the agreement for Harris to move to MAPS’s standard of 100% confirmed opt-in.
“Some of our mail was still getting blocked by ISPs that were following the RBL,” Harris spokesman Dan Hucko said. “So at that point we started to talk to MAPS and say OK, how can we get off the RBL.”
Hucko said that the change from its policy of single opt in to MAPS’s standard of confirmed opt in, which the company began six months ago, turned out to be a positive change.
“We found that once we started to recruit all of our panel members through a confirmed opt in process, those panel members were more thorough, more thoughtful and more accurate in their responses which made our market surveys more valuable,” Hucko said.
And while Harris had initiated the confirmed opt-in policy months ago on its new panelists, MAPS would not remove Harris from the RBL until it agreed to move its entire database to a confirmed opt-in status. As part of the agreement, Harris will follow a schedule to confirm the full database, an effort that is expected to take months, Hucko said.
“We were very pleased to be able to work with and assist Harris in developing its plan to move to fully confirmed opt-in,” Anne P. Mitchell, MAPS’ director of legal and public affairs, said in a statement. “They had determined that they get a better quality of response from their customers when they mail only to people who have confirmed that they want to receive the material, and they approached us for our assistance in implementing that process.”
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