Someone's Watching

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

More importantly, LashBack's president and CEO can tell if your company's affiliates are complying with those requests, and whether they're using or abusing your suppression file.

Phillips' firm offers UnsubMonitor, a service for e-mail marketers that generates reports detailing whether people who ask not to receive messages are getting their requests granted.

“[Our] tool allows organizations that want to be compliant with the law to see and enforce how their partners are acting,” Phillips says. “Before, they had no way to know if a partner actually used its suppression file before it sent e-mail. We can now tell when unsubscribe requests are not being honored, and we can [notify] ad networks when an affiliate fails to scrub before sending.”

Among its customers is data giant Experian, which uses LashBack to ensure affiliates grant opt-outs as required by the Can Spam Act.

Just before that law went into effect in 2003, Phillips and partner Eric Castelli were working on technology that could handle e-mail list unsubscribes automatically. They tested 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 says. “Either your unsubscribe request was ignored or your address was put on a suppression file that was being misused, and you'd be getting more stuff.”

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

“[Even so,] it's important to note that the unsubscribe abusers send a disproportionate volume of mail compared with those who care about [Can Spam] compliance,” he says.

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

As a result, LashBack provides UnsubSafe, 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 UnsubSafe and be assured their address won't be abused.

LashBack then analyzes the e-mail header to see if the sender can be trusted to honor an unsubscribe, based on past behavior. If so, 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 says “tens of thousands” of consumers are using UnsubSafe, from which LashBack gets most of its unsubscribe data for UnsubMonitor. It also seeds companies' suppression files with unused e-mail addresses of its own.

“Then we know that if the address starts receiving mail, the file is being abused,” he says.

LashBack monitors the unsubscribe behavior of more than 4.2 million sending IP addresses and processes millions of unsubscribe requests a month, Phillips notes. Thus it's also able to offer UnsubScore, a sort of credit scoring system for firms' unsubscribe practices. Anti-spam technology concerns Cloudmark and MXLogic use LashBack data to help them decide what 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 for determining whether 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 says.

UnsubMonitor starts at about $300 a month for small companies and can run as high as “several thousand dollars a month” for larger firms, according to Phillips.