On 14 Nov 2003 at 18:53, SANTU DESILVA <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Coming out of lurkdom to ask:
>
> Could you define these terms as you heard them defined at
> the FTC Span Forum you attended in May? The description
> the gentleman from Notre Dame used seemed particularly
> clear to me. Has this usage been altered, as he seems to
> suggest?
Sorry for the delay in answering, as I wanted to provide a thorough
answer, and haven't had time to go searching through the very long
transcripts.
The full transcripts of the FTC Spam Forum are available at:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/spam/index.html
The definitions were on Day 2, pages 219 to 226, presented by Rebecca
Lieb, in the context of the "Best Practices" panel.
It was a pretty long discussion, so I won't quote the whole thing,
but here are the main points:
"[...]lots of references have been made over the past two days to opt-
in and opt-out, and there are more subtle gradations along that
chain, and I've identified five[...]
[I include the following paragraph as a nod in Paul's direction, as
his views on the subject were presented as well, which I had
forgotten]
"[...]my descriptions of these are going to be more important than
what I call them. Some people say, well, only Spammers call it double-
opt-in, and if it's really double-opt-in, you have to say it's
confirmed opt-in if you're legitimate, semantics. I suppose people
are eventually going to agree on the terminology. What's important is
to understand what the various options are and what they mean to
both users and to e-mailers[...]
"I'll start with the worst and work up. The worst practices, and I
think there was some consensus on this yesterday among the audience,
at least, is opt-out. Opt-out is when somebody's address is added to
a list without their knowledge or permission, and it's the
recipient's job to tell the sender that they don't want it
anymore[...]
"A step above that is confirmed opt-out. Your e-mail address is added
to a list of recipients, and you receive an e-mail saying you have
been added to this list, you can do something about it, and then
there is some sort of unsubscribe option in that e-mail[...]
"Right in the middle of the equation is pure opt-in, which is pretty
straightforward. You go to a website, there's a thing that says sign
up for our newsletter or our specials or our deals, you type in your
e-mail address, hit send, and you're subscribed[...]
"Better than that is confirmed opt-in. You opt-in to something, and
because you have opted into it, you get an e-mail, and it says, you
have opted into this. Here's your user name and your password, if
that's the case, and at least you know what's going on[...]
"The gold standard is what I term -- and there is some disagreement
on this, but I think it's the clearest terminology -- double-
confirmed opt-in. [...] The user takes an action to subscribe, and
immediately receives an e-mail that says, you have subscribed to
this, but in case you are not the person who subscribed to this, your
subscription is not going to be active until you answer this e-mail
to confirm that this e-mail address is really the e-mail address that
wants this subscription.
"It's a more cumbersome process. The response rate to those e-mails
is between 40 and 60 percent, which scares a lot of marketers and
publishers to death, but it makes for the least complaints, the
happiest subscribers and the most valuable lists for marketers and
advertisers, because these people have proven not once, but twice,
that this is, indeed, something that they want and are eager to
receive."
So, mea culpa, I used "double opt-in" instead of her term of "double-
confirmed opt-in".
I've mostly seen the term "double opt-in" since in marketing
literature, and so that's what we used in the newsletter. We aren't
trying to convert the anti-spammers. We want to convince the
*marketers* -- those who want to be legitimate -- to do things right
and not alienate their subscribers (the scumbag spammers are
hopeless, there's no point trying to convince _them_). So we used
*their* language.
Francoise
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