Keeping Your Would-Be Spamming Affiliates in Check

Brandon Phillips can tell if you’re honoring opt-out requests.

More importantly, the president and CEO of LashBack can tell if your affiliates are honoring opt-out requests, and whether or not they’re using or abusing your suppression file.  

 “What we’ve built is a tool that allows organizations that want to be compliant with the law to see and enforce how their partners are acting,” he said. “Before, they had no way to see if a partner actually used their suppression file before they sent e-mail. We can now tell when unsubscribe requests are not being honored, and we can tell ad networks when an affiliate fails to scrub before sending.”

Among its customers is data giant Experian, which uses LashBack to ensure affiliates honor opt-out requests, he said.

In 2003 as the Can-Spam act—which requires advertisers to honor opt-out requests—was getting ready to go into effect, Phillips and his partner, Eric Castelli, built technology that would unsubscribe from e-mail lists automatically and began testing every unsubscribe method they could find in e-mail newsletters and other marketing programs.

“It didn’t take too long to realize that unsubscribing wasn’t really stopping the mail and that if you unsubscribed from the wrong party it would be big trouble for you,” Phillips said. “Either your unsubscribe request was being ignored or your address was being put on a suppression file that was being misused, and you’d be getting more stuff.”

Suppression-file abuse—where spammers send e-mail to people on unsubscribe lists—is still happening, according to Phillips, though he added that just 2.5% of unsubscribe links on average currently lead to more spam.

“That said, it’s important to note that the unsubscribe abusers send a disproportionate volume of mail as compared to those who care about [Can-Spam] compliance,” he said.

Moreover, it’s impossible to tell which unsubscribe links will lead to more mail and which won’t. “When consumers are looking at an unsubscribe link, they all look alike,” said Phillips.

As a result, LashBack provides a free unsubscribe service consumers can download to their computers. Whenever they want to opt out of an e-mail list, they can click on LashBack’s unsubscribe function and trust that their address won’t be abused.

LashBack then analyzes the e-mail header to see if, based on past behavior, the sender can be trusted to honor an unsubscribe. If the sender is trustable, LashBack submits the consumer’s e-mail through the unsubscribe button. If not, LashBack adds the sender to its anti-spam blocking list if the sender isn’t already on it.

Phillips said “tens of thousands” of consumers are using the free service from which LashBack gets most of its unsubscribe data. The company also seeds companies’ suppression files with unused e-mail addresses of its own.

“That way, we know if the e-mail address starts receiving mail, the file is being abused,” he said.

LashBack monitors the unsubscribe behavior of more than 4.2 million sending IP addresses and processes millions of unsubscribe requests a month, according to Phillips.

As a result, it is able to offer a service called UnsubScore, which is a sort of credit scoring system for companies’ unsubscribe practices. Anti-spam technology concerns Cloudmark and MXLogic use Lashback data to help them decide which e-mail their clients—which include 50 Internet service providers—should filter.

UnsubScore can affect an advertiser’s deliverability in more than 350 million inboxes worldwide, according to Phillips.

Reputation service provider Return Path uses UnsubScore as one of the criteria to determine whether or not to certify a sender as a non-spammer.

“If you’re not honoring unsubscribe requests, we feed that information to Return Path and its Sender Score Certified program and you won’t qualify,” he said.

The service starts at about $300 a month for small companies and can run as high as “several thousand dollars a month” for larger companies, said Phillips.