Email marketing and Dealing With Anti-Spam Laws

I am trying to self-teach myself (through watching a lot of YouTube videos) how to do email marketing because as a pianist, composer, arranger, writer, and also the co-founder of Celebration of Joy, Inc. (a non-profit founded in 2014), I realize that good email marketing practices can draw a lot of web traffic as well as email traffic to your domain email name, and create a major boost to your resume.

But I realize that bad email marketing practices, especially when you send emails in bulk, can get one in trouble. Sometimes big trouble in a way that you could be shut down email-wise, criminally and/or civilly fined, and/or be put into the slammer. You could run afoul of the anti-spam laws like CAN-SPAM from the USA (or the "Control and Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing") or CASL from Canada (Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation).

 I realize that such bad practices can lead to mild to extremely painful legal implications and consequences--ranging from being warned of permanent shutdown of your email account from your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or ESP (Email Service Provider)--all the way to having your email business or account shut down temporarily or permanently by anti-spam blacklists---all the way to having a knock on the door by an FBI agent and then you are taken away in handcuffs and sent to jail for all of this. When you are flagged as a spammer, and already have a third-party bulk email marketing service that you use (Constant Contact, MailChimp, Mad Mimi, etc.), and you do not do good practices to mitigate these accusations ro avoid being flagged in the future (aka "reported"), it can cause severe damage to you as a email marketer. With this, I classify these implications and consequences into three categories...

1. Mild Penalties
2. Moderate Penalties
3. Severe Penalties

  MILD PENALTIES
1. The ESP will email your with a warning that you will be sanctioned on your email account for bad marketing practices, which usually a shut down of your email temporarily without being on an email blacklist, most often through a suspension of your email account, if you continue spamming.

2. Often, the recipients will warn you individually that you emailed them with the intent to spam them---and often they will report you as such and say that they will take further action on you if you continue to email them without asking first.

 3. The ESP will probably drop your email reputation score 5-10 points.

 Often, you will get these penalties for........

1. Several or more incidences of hard bounces, but not too much.
2. Lots of soft bounces.
 3. Several incidences of low open rates or high bounce rates on your email campaigns.

MODERATE PENALTIES 
1. The ESP can temporarily stop you from sending mass emails or email blasts if you send emails in bulk, especially if you do that using bad email lists (they will usually have very bad SPFs--sender profile formats) or lists from people that you did not get consent by them to send the emails if you do this in bulk. Usually from 7 days to up to 28 days.

 2. The ESP can drop your email sender score (or reputation score) about 30-40 points. 2. The ISP on your own website could place your IP address on a red-flag and you may get a warning from any of the anti-spam companies (after being informed that the IP address was flagged) that if you do not change your practices for the better, they will blacklist you.

 Often, you will get these penalties for... 
1. A moderate amount of hard bounces and not doing everything you can to cut back on them on your email campaigns.
2. Doing email blasts or email bulk sends with outdated email addresses.
3. Sending blasts to 500-1000 recipients where a lot of these email addresses are spoofed or had been red-flagged in the past as emails coming from known spammers.

SEVERE PENALTIES
1. Spamhaus, Barracuda, and other similar DBLs (Domain Block Lists, also known as anti-spam blacklists) can put a domain email address - or even worse - a domain IP address - on a blacklist or two for serious spam violations you do. You get a 100 percent shot of being blacklisted for repeat serious spam violations. If that happens ("blacklisted"), you cannot send email at all, or even use your website at all. Any email that you send when you are blacklisted will head straight to the junk folder or your recipient's spam box--all the time!--even if the emails are lawful to send and even if you have permission from the recipients to send it---Every time. When you try to open up your own website, you realize that you got blocked and you cannot open the site. I am imagining a lot of online email marketers and businesses who ended up bankrupt or disbanded or even homeless when they get blacklisted by DBLs. Trying to get off a blacklist so you can do email again is not easy for most of the DBLs that you face. In most cases you have to petition the DBL or DBLs that you were accountable for the violations and you are doing better practices--this is the only way usually to get yourself off a blacklist. But in some DBLs, it is not guaranteed if you try to get yourself off one.
(Blacklisting is one of the several legal remedies under CAN-SPAM.)

 2. Authorities like the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) will send you mail that you will not like at all and extremely abhor--a notice that you are going to have to pay a very heavy fine---$16,000, for each violation of the CAN-SPAM act. Also known as a summons. If you are a Canadian business owner who uses email marketing and you seriously violate CASL, expect bad news from the Canadian authorities when you get a civil summons that requires you to pay up to a maximum $10,000,000 fine in Canadian dollars for violating that law. I don't know about some of the other ways other countries punish with their anti-spam laws but I do have a bit of a hunch that the consequences are going to be similarly or near-similarly strong.

 3. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) also can be involved--as well as the FTC, and you will get an arrest warrant and you have days to turn yourself in to police for serious spam violations. You may even get a summons to appear in criminal court without being arrested, but still, being summoned by the FBI is extremely serious. You get convicted criminally as a spammer on a violation that will send you to federal prison, and you will have a stain on your rap sheet especially after you get out of federal prison. A felony conviction will mean that employers will see this as public record--such criminal records are going to be difficult to efface or expunge--and that means most of these employers might disqualify you from the job that you love or desire--even if it is not a security-sensitive job---through all of those pre-employment background checks that are commonly done by employers.

 4. Finally, the email reputation score will certainly go down 70 to 80 points, maybe even up to 90 points, so you get something like a reputation score of 5 to 10, or 1 to 5, or even 0. If your sender score goes down to 0, it is like getting the lowest point on a grade of F in college. It can ruin your future or even your life! Your reputation score in your domain email address is a bit like your FICO credit score. 90-100 is a great sender score, 80-89 is good, 70-79 is average, 60-69 is fair, and 59 or lower is poor. 

You get these penalties by a lot of these "no-no" practices that are really against the law, but here are some of them...

 1. Using dictionary attacks by way of an automated program to steal these email addresses (and even their passwords) in order to make your email lists.
2. Harvesting thousands of email addresses from unclean lists in order to build your email lists.
3. Harvesting email addresses without telling those recipients how you got these email addresses in order to build your email lists.
4. Excessive incidences of not honoring opt-outs or unsubscribes in your email campaigns.
 5. A master load of incidences of hard bounces on your email campaigns and not doing good-faith methods to keep these hard bounces low.

HOW TO KEEP YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS FROM RUNNING AFOUL OF THE ANTI-SPAM LAWS 

Well, basically, I found out that the CAN-SPAM law is a good way to go for me to help me follow the anti-spam rules. Most of the requirements in this anti-spam law I can get.......

  1. You cannot lie in the subject line. That is, your subject heading in the line has to correlate to the email body message that relates to it. If not, you are in trouble.

  2. You cannot use a deceptive email address.
Generally you steer away from trouble if you make an email address from a reputable ESP like Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, or Google (or Gmail) which require you to make a username and password for your made email address. Then those ESPs do several required protocols (DKIM, DNS Feedback loops, reverse DNS lookup, etc.) to make sure that the email address IS the email address that you send to recipients--that is, a real email address, not an unreal one.

3. To avoid the risk of recipients opening up pornography where they are not allowed to be shown such, CAN-SPAM requires that emails that do have pornography have "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" in caps and in quotation marks--in the subject line. 

4. If the email is promotional, the law requires that such emails are an advertisement. At the end of the email, you should say something like this....

 "This is an advertisement from (name of company)."

 This is a simple way to do it but there are variations on how you can do it.

 5. Promotional emails require that you have a physical website that you can be reached (and an email address), or a physical address. 

Then there are the more tricky parts of the law.

 6. You need to have express permission from the email recipient or recipients to send promotional emails to the recipient or recipients. 

I realize that it is hard to do this manually, and the best way out of this is to use a third-party email service that will do a double opt-in process (common now for permission-based email), such as Constant Contact, MNB (Mail Newsletter Builder), or MailChimp. They will have protocols that will do the permissions for you so that the recipients can sign up for your email lists. Double opt-in is where those third-party email services do a background check on those email addresses who want to subscribe with permission to see if they are fake, scam, or deceptive addresses before the emails go through to finish the permission process. If the email addresses are bad, those third parties automatically jettison such emails off the list ASAP.

 7. You need to tell the email recipient or recipients a way to opt-out of your emails. (In other words, "unsubscribe'.)

 This is probably easier to do under CAN-SPAM than trying to get permission from the recipients. Opt-out means that the recipient decides to not want any more emails from you. That's basically it. I could do this sentence in my email campaigns, like so:

If you at anytime you want to opt-out or unsubscribe from this email list, you can contact me directly through email and I will get you off the list in 6 hours."

 I understand that under this section of the law, the opt-out needs to work for 30 days. Third-party email services often do this for me more easily than I can do on my own. But to make sure that I honor the opt-outs, I can write down something like my own email blacklist....a list of email addresses of recipients who want to opt-out so I do not accidentally send these emails to them again.

Anti-spam laws, especially CAN-SPAM and also CASL, are not going to be easy for me. I know these laws are very serious business and I need to follow them. 

Do you have any other pointers on how I can be a better email marketer? Please put on the comments below.

Thanks.

What Would I Experience if I Were To Go To Studio 54 During The Disco Craze?

From about age 5 to age 9 (this was from 1976 to 1980),

I missed disco, and its correlated discotheques. This was because I was

too young to go to such disco clubs at that time.


So I had to imagine being in the heart of this craze. After

researching on the hottest disco nightclub in the United States,

Studio 54, I was imagining myself waiting in line to get into the

club. Learned that the owner (who was also the doorman at that time)

made up his own rules on who can get in…and who cannot. I think that

the doorman will at first say that I will not be allowed in because of

my African-American race, but my very curly hair—although I was not in

a full-fledged Afro hairdo—would make the owner reconsider his

rejection, and I would be let in.


What would I see? A sea of colored moving lights, and a sea of colors

in the club patrons wearing platform shoes, three-piece suits, and

a lot of casual garb. Learning from what Steve Dahl mentioned when

he hated disco, I would also have seen ladies don plenty and plenty

of jewelry—the garb that Steve Dahl did not like in the disco craze.

I would have mind the jewelry. I was not into the drugs they had in

the place so I would stay away from that…I would instead focus on

hitting on the right woman or women to dance with, and eventually I

would imagine finding a lady to dance to that is almost like Karen

Lynn Gorney in the movie “Saturday Night Fever”, even if the real

Karen was not there.  I would see a very loose but controlled chaos of

dancers either dancing the line hustle, or doing freestyle disco

dancing (letting it all out), or of course, do one of the popular

partner disco dances at that time

made famous by the band Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony…yes, the

hustle.

Six Flags Great America Memories---The Rides I Have Ridden On in the 1980s

I was in Great America several times in the 1980s, so as I try to remember the times I rode the rides, I can think of memories of some of them….

WHITEWATER RAMPAGE

Well, it is supposed to be the water ride at that theme park that would bring us more thrills than the already-installed Log Flume that I rode before in Six Flags. It was announced on TV that a ride called the Whitewater Rampage was going to be on, and even with a slight fear of water, I decided to take on the Rampage. After I got through a rather long line, I see a warning message that said “You are going to get wet…probably soaked…after riding this ride.” I knew I was going to get wet, but I don’t know at that point how much. I was sitting with about 6-7 people in a sort of saucer module with an outer skin of yellow and seats with seat beat restraints in black. The ride is innocent enough in the begging with the gentle whitewater bumps, but then, the saucer picks up speed gradually in the middle of the ride. I got lashed in the back at least once with a bit of water. Then, the surprise comes after I got through halfway through the ride, after going through a rather long tunne….exploding geysers fire in the air up to 40 feet high, and I was about 25 feet away from it when it fired. They released about ½ to ¾ gallons of water and when they dropped all of that water on me, I got a partial brunt—ending up being wet with about 1/3 gallons of water. Then the grand finale of the ride was the climax, the module goes down into more whitewater bumps that were larger and bigger, and I got lashed 2 more times with water, and on the last bump, I think I got a direct hit from behind by the water….and then, it was all over. I had an extra set of clothes to change after I got off the ride. THE

LOG FLUME 
The ride seems to be in 4 phases. I had been on the Flume twice, so I can remember:

Phase 1
You go across the first sinuous curve and you are taken up with the first ascent of about 75 feet, feeling a shaky wooden-like feel even though this is not a wooden rollercoaster. Must be steel cables doing the work.

Phase 2
Then, I feel the light drop and then it is a sinuous ride with left banks, right banks, and then left banks again, and then, a slight drop of 15 feet gets you a bit wet (a prelude to the grand finale of the ride), and then, you end up in a new straightaway.

Phase 3
Another slight drop of about 10 feet gets you down and gets you slightly more wet again, and then a few more short straightaways and a few more banks. At that point, I feel like a log but I know that there is another final big climb to come.

Phase 4 – The Grand Finale
This challenged me a little bit—because I was a bit afraid of heights but I was able to deal with it---the final ascent, the second of the ascents, as big as the first, gets you as high as about 85 feet, then you go straight for about 15 more feet. Then I see what is coming below—the big drop with the great pool of water below to splash me at, and then I braced myself for the drop that would happen at speeds as high as 50 mph, I placed my head down forward as the drop happened, punctuated by a mule bump in the middle (about 40 feet), and then, I can hear the great splash, and I got sideswiped with a splash of water. Then I raised my head and I found out that part of my legs and my back of the shirt got wet, but I knew that the ride was over.

1995 Lecture Notes from English 260 - The Black Arts Movement

LIMITATIONS TO THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT Christianity--is considered a religion to keep Blacks in their place because of.... * worldly emphasis (not direct)--not action * Eurocentric bias (the casting of God as a white man * representation of the Black church as inwardly focused on self-perpetuation * representing the Black church for only its own perpetuation (lack of environment) The blues was rejected for advocating a resolution and accepting it. The Nation of Islam (NOI) countervail any Christian influence because..... * Islam was a religion native to Africa for Christianity was foreign and Europeanized * Islam was never connected to slavery or slave trade * Islamic minds would have minds in orderly structure * Islam ministered Africans who were not of the Christian faith who were criminals * The N.O.I. had an economic program that led to empowerment. * Islam helps Muslims underpin the Islamic conversion from other religions. The Black Power Movement died because...... * intervention and disruptive tendencies of the American Government to stop Black political groups such as the BPP (Black Panther Party) * the arrest(s) and scare tactics (e.g., Cointelpro and other counter-insurgency tactics) that drove away Black leaders from the country or from freedom to jail. * the war in Vietnam--black males were drafted to the highest because of their severe belligerency-- and it led to political impotence. Blacks died more than Whites in the war in Vietnam. * Riots in Kent State and Jackson State universities were also caught in the middle. There was no sustain political or artistic Black movement after 1973, even after the Vietnam ended. Reasons... * Integration helped--discrimination laws were enforced * Sharing of space--now allowed a certain aspect of Blacks to integrate with whites. They could also live in various integrated committees in a different model or perspective of African-Americans who witnesses to leadership points. If blacks come through in white places with more resources then it will be a leadership that would be much more stable.

New Classic Rock Songs That I am Starting to Love

The list will be updated when I add more of my newest favorite songs........

"Child In Time" (Deep Purple)

"Foreplay/It's Been a Long Time" (Boston)

"Lazy" (Deep Purple)

"Life During Wartime" (The Talking Heads)

"Mona Lisa" (Sheila E.)

"Money For Nothing" (Dire Straits)

"Smokin'" (Boston)

"The Sultans of Swing" (Dire Straits)

"Welcome Back My Friends" (Emerson, Lake and Palmer)

My Notes from "A Solo Song For Doc" (by James Alan McPhearson)

PART A

He's 63, and in the Union; he knows the business well. The railroad business seems to be on its demise.

He build the railroad, as well as Sheik Beasley, Uncle T. Boone, and Danny Jacson.

The old school died with Doc Jer (Jerry Ewald was "the unexpected inspector"). He knows how to get people.

Doc was already a man. He had no skills and was Black. He wondered on December 25, 1916 into a dining car in Chicago to get to San Francisco.

Chips Magnusson on leads Doc into the waiter business. His real name (Doc) was Leroy Jackson.

The Sheik was impressed, but Doc is scorned by him for failing to pay tips for him.

PART B

He came from the war, but this was 1941. He says that being on the road is safer. He knows that the Polacks and redneck boys have gone to war.

The Depression still lingers, so everyone tries to rob someone. There were no company or work rules, so lots of stealing in the waiter's business.

Doc used the drink-bootlegged booze to the soldiers, and Casper and him were the best moneymakers.

The farm people in their towns hated Blacks.

No one wanted a stiff, swelty farm girl.

He remembers being in a bar in one racial town, and while he was getting a joint, he tried to get a team job. But he was spat upon and was refused.

Willie Joe is most feared by him for he started something bad with her girl.

He liked getting drunk with the boys at Andy's (bar) and not being married to some bad girl. But Doc knew how to handle women.

The war ended (1945), and the farm boys coming home did not want to spend money on the way.

Things turn different. Casper gets caught for a bad shock; new rules are now written.

They (the trains) are losing passengers due to the airplanes.

After the General J. Freed case, he starts a KKK group.

The Sheik was pulled off the train for stealing.

The union was established and the stealers stopped their acts.

They are warned about the rules, but they got seniority in return for rule following.

Doc turns 65 years old and drunk hard. He has now wife, relatives or even a hobby.

He warns Doc that there is a downsizing of employees on trains.

Freight trains are much more in demand. He warns Doc to get another job but the Doc refuses.

Doc might have been crippled by arthritis and a bad heart.

Trisdale was now the general superintendent.

It was determined that bad service will cause Doc to suffer the demise of his job.

The Commissary went out and sent spotters to detect Doc's bad service.

Boone tried to attack Doc for his good manners.

Boone said that Doc and such blacks like him lack humility for such jobs like these.

Then, the author tells to ignore Boone's harrassment.

PART C

Jerry Ewald got on in the next day after lunch, and Crusoe looks at Doc.

Doc handles the silver soup to Jerry as if a Jew talks handles a needle.

Jerry is impressed with Doc's good service.

Doc is warned about the new rule for proper iced tea services (on July 9, 1965)

Jerry warned Doc that he broke two rules already.

Doc refuses to give in to Jerry's request.

Jerry warns Doc that waiter work on trains will all be over.

No one said anything to Doc.

PART 4

Doc was forced to retire because of the rule book.

Doc got a good pension and took it to Andy's.

Doc died about 5 months later at 73, of severe frostbite and excessive drinking.

The Decapitation of James Foley: What Can We Do Next in Regards to Iraq?

The best way to deal with this shocking death of Mr. Foley is for President Obama to back down on any further bombing action against ISIS militants in Iraq indefinitely. This is probably the only way that we can save face from this pretty awful news of the beheading of James Foley now, because I found out that ISIS captured another American and threatened to decapitate that American unless America stops bombing operations against ISIS militants.

I myself did not want to see the decapitation video myself because it was too scary. Youtube took that execution video down very quickly. Too scary for virtually anyone to see.

Most news companies regard the execution as extremely graphic and hence won't show it.

I did see something similar to the taken-down video in the movie "Fahrenheit 9-11", directed by Michael Moore, where in the middle of the movie, there is a scene where a condemned man is fatally butchered by a beheading in public in the town of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. The one executed was not James Foley, but a Saudi. But I was imagining being in James Foley shoes as I saw the executioner in the movie raise his long sword high over the victim's head, and then slash through the victim's head twice--the second attempt successfully slicing his head off. The results would not be pleasing for me. Nothing funny at all about it!!!

But what can we do? What can we do about what happened to James Foley?

It is so hard for me to figure out what would happen in this new Iraq that we are hearing about.

Before the first Iraq invasion, I thought things would be hunky-dory when Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq. Then we hear about what he did to the Kurds in Iraq, and then, about 1992, the First Gulf War came. The war was successful and I thought everything in Iraq would be better again.

Then, in 2001, the 9-11 attacks happened to our country! President Bush orders another Second Gulf War because there were educated guesses that Al-Qaeda--the ruthless terrorist group led by Osama Bin Laden--may have been behind the attacks and probably such terrorists may have been in Iraq. Saddam was captured, convicted, and hanged after the war but America's eyes was on Public Enemy no. 1--Osama bin Laden.

Then, as the war ended, the price we paid was very heavy even after the official war was over. Iraqi insurgents got very mad and decided to do guerilla warfare on us!! The tricks were scary and this definitely smacks to what the Vietnam War was with guerilla warfare. Mechanical bobby traps and land mines were the guerrilla tactics in the Vietnam War--but in post-war Iraq, it is modernized through a new type of land mine---roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices. So with these scare tactics, America finally pulled its troops out of Iraq recently. But before the American troops were pulling out of Iraq, America got its most ruthless terrorist--Bin Laden--in a commando raid in his home in Pakistan by special forces--and then the special forces killed Bin Laden. I was thinking to myself, "Why did the special forces decide to not capture him, but kill him?" Well, that question is likely going to be unanswered for a very long time, because the exact names of the special forces soldiers in that mission to kill Bin Laden still generally remain top-secret.

Then, for reasons I still do not know about, a new terrorist group called ISIS made its presence in Iraq. Their tactics are almost like the Taliban--but because of the James Foley beheading, most likely they are a bit worse than the Taliban. All of the "shariat" laws that educated Islam people know are completely thrown out, and humanity is dropped to the lowest abyss, causing things like hostage-taking and post-kidnapping beheadings.

With that, James Foley will be missed, surely. There needs to be profound amends for this senseless execution, but retaliatory military action is not the answer at this time.