Yesmail.com and Internet watchdog group Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC, reached an agreement yesterday on standards and safeguards for e-mail marketing that the two hope will be adopted industry wide.
As part of the deal New York-based yesmail agreed to employ a confirmed, or double-opt-in model as its standard for obtaining customer permission to send promotions. A protocol MAPS touts as its standard to avoid landing on its Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) of alleged spammers.
The agreement ends weeks of legal skirmishes and discussion after MAPS in July threatened to list yesmail, a permission-based e-mail marketer, on its RBL.
David Tolmie, CEO of yesmail, said that an understanding was reached over what both MAPS’ and yesmail’s goals were. “We were both trying to get to what’s best for the consumer,” Tolmie said.
“We expect yesmail.com’s adoption of this protocol to be a catalyst for other e-mail marketers to comply with this standard,” Paul Vixie, a managing partner of MAPS, Redwood City, CA said in a statement.
The companies also reached agreement concerning the use and auditing policies for yesmail’s existing mailing list of 11 million names during the transition period. Tolmie declined to comment on the specific procedures that would be put in place to prevent fraudulent registrations.
“We recognize that as this industry matures, e-mail marketers need to continually evaluate what are the most appropriate and highest standards to ensure the protection of consumers,” Tolmie said.
The principles, called Basic Mailing List Management Principles for Preventing Abuse, can be viewed at http://mail-abuse.org/manage.html.
In a separate action, MAPS was named earlier this week as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by market research firm Harris Interactive against a number of prominent Internet Service Providers. The ISPs blocked the firm from corresponding with millions of its registered online panelists after MAPS listed Harris Interactive on its RBL.
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