From: wayne@appsales.net (Wayne McFarland) Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email Subject: Response To Your Concerns Date: 3 Jan 2002 13:24:39 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Lines: 130 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.168.244.16 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1010093080 30804 127.0.0.1 (3 Jan 2002 21:24:40 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 3 Jan 2002 21:24:40 GMT This is Wayne McFarland, CEO of Link It Software/App Sales. I'm writing to not only address some of the issues here, but to ask for your help. I do ask for your indulgence as well, as I have not posted to a newsgroup before, and I am hopeful I am following proper protocol. Let me begin by saying that there's a number of folks out there who have every right to be mad at us. There's just no way to put a good face on it; my company screwed up and mishandled our E Mail marketing for some months; from August to about the first part of November as far as I can tell; although there could have been some abuse that I'm unaware of before that. Actually, "mishandled" is a bit mealy mouthed. In just a short period of time, we managed to trash our reputation and anger a lot of good people by acting like the worst of repeat spammers. I bitterly regret that and would turn the clock back if I could. I cannot, of course, but we have been working hard to rectify things. I am writing here to both let you know what we've done, address some of the issues here, and to say that any suggestions you may have as to how we can do things better would be gratefully received. My direct E Mail is wayne@linkitsoftware.com. My direct phone number is (661) 254-9925. I noted that one of your messages said we'd been spamming for seven months or so. Actually we started E Mail marketing our software almost a year ago. For a number of months things were being done properly; it was later that the problems arose. I also wish to go on the record as stateing that as a marketing guy I've experimented with E Mail maketing off and on over the past few years. Those experiences made it clear that cleared or opt in lists were the only way to go; anything else leads to nothing but trouble and uproar. We are a software company which sells software to manufacturers. After years of custom work and waiting, my partner--who is also my wife--and I developed our initial product. Our firm is totally self funded; everything we have is invested here, and the last thing we need or want is to make our potential customer base angry with us. We began and plan to continue our marketing by purchasing "cleared" E Mail lists from reputable magazines and publications in the manufacturing industry. This has worked pretty well, except that we now have learned the reputable company or not, we need to verify the lists to make sure they really are "cleared." Part of our troubles, but only a minor portion of them, were due to not doing that initially. Where the problem really developed was through staffing here, and procedures being either ignored or deliberately circumvented. I read in one of the threads here that there's some skepticism that we really do have an E Mail department. We do, but I really don't know how to verify that for you beyond saying it's so. At any rate, our department head, among other things, started spamming at night using our T1 for accounts such as credit repair companies, and God knows what else. He further started setting up Yahoo and Hotmail E Mail accounts for all returns, removes, etc. which guarenteed that we would not only look like spammers, but that numerous removes would disappear, communication and abuse E Mail would bounce, etc. etc. etc. A mess. I'm CEO here, and I am responsible for what my employees do, no question. It's a fact, though, that you just can't micro manage everyone, and sometimes things get pretty well out of hand before you realize where the problems really are. The uproar grew quickly. My expertise does not lie in the technical area, and by the time I realized my chain was being pulled, we were getting hammered pretty hard. I fired the department head, and shut down all the E Mail marketing. We reinstituted our own procedures, and followed the advice of another anti-spam organization to do the following: We worked with our bandwidth provider, who was also upset, to make sure we were in conformance with their requirements. We set up our own mail server will all the pre requesit E Mail boxes and addresses for both communication with us, and inclusion in all of our E Mails. We made sure our phone number was included in all our E Mail. We went through every "remove" file we could find internally here, both E Mail address and domains, and washed our entire list against it. We set up an ongoing "remove" list that every new E Mail address is "washed" against. We test every "cleared" list we buy or rent to see if E Mails on our "remove list" pop up in it, and if we see that or more than 10% "non deliverable" on our test of a "cleared" list sample we refuse to purchase the list. We wash all new "removes" daily against our lists to make sure everything is totally current every 24 hours. Per a suggestion from another anti-spam group we are also testing procedures to have actual recipiants of a supposedly "cleared" rental or purchase list verify that they indeed have asked to be on it (any suggestions you may have here would be appreciated). All of this took some three weeks or so. In sorting through the mess, it became apparent that a lot of remove requests had simply been trashed, so we alerted our bandwidth provider that it would probably take one resend or so of our list to re capture all of the removes, and that there would be some additional uproar, as a number of the "remove" requests would be from frustrated people who had asked previously and been ignored. We sent the list, got a large number of "removes," took care of them all, and the number fell like a stone next time around. It is my understanding that a well managed "opt in" list should be receiving "remove" requests at a level of 1% or below of the total list. If this is true, I am pleased to tell you that our "remove" request level has now dropped below one half on one percent of our total list on each send, and the angry phone calls have dropped off to almost zero. We're not where we want to be yet, as there are still folks out there who have requested to be removed previously and were mis-handled, but I think we've taken care of the vast majority of them. We also were offering the service to other corporations (businesses only) to E Mail their customer lists and "opt in" lists. I have stopped that altogether; we no longer offer that service (we probably have three or four lists to send for corporate customers under old contracts, but that's it and the contracts will not be renewed). So that's where we are. This whole episode really hurt us, not only in terms of our reputation, but in terms our our sales...we're just not big enough to shut down our marketing without some real suffering taking place. Now that we're back up, I am determined that things be done right. I can't say we won't occasionally stumble, but I can say that when we do, we'll take care of the problem immediately, in spite of recent appearances. To accomplish that, I am very hopeful I can have your help with suggestions, or alerts to me personally if we get any more complaints. I'll be out of town for the holidays but I'll visit here regularly until this Friday, and after I return following the New Year. And to Bill Carton, whose comments are listed here...Bill, look, I'm sorry. If you recall, we both came on pretty strongly and I think if both our tempers were bottled, we could light up a small city. Um...I didn't say to f**k my Scottish ass, I said to kiss my Scottish ass. And that's bad enough; so I do apologize; I haven't lost my temper like that in a long time, and I was in the wrong. Happy holidays to all, and we'll work hard to demonstrate our seriousness and commitment in the new year. Wayne McFarland