Double opt-in done right

March 14, 2001 —

Let's start a simple crusade that will benefit us all. The crusade is to get companies using e-mail for marketing to properly use double opt-in. We will cure them of their ignorance by embarrassing them.

Why do we need double opt-in? To deal with people who go to the Diapers ‘R' Us Web site, sign up for "Baby Diaper Offers Daily" and put in the wrong address.

Maybe they use the wrong address because the intense emotions caused by the promise of diaper data interferes with their higher brain functions, or perhaps they suffer a seizure while typing, or perhaps they are just too stupid to know their own identities.

How difficult is it to get a sequence of thirty or forty characters right when those characters represent you? Apparently from the amount of misdirected e-mail I get, much harder than one would think.

Getting someone else's address wrong is not too surprising. I regularly get e-mail for people at several companies, such as Gibbs and Associates, Gibbs Die Casting and the Katharine Gibbs School. You can see why -- their domains are gibbscam.com, gibbsdc.com and kgibbs.com.

I said getting someone else's address wrong was not too surprising, but actually when it is a vendor sending a message to a client and the vendor can't get the domain right, you have to wonder how sparky the vendor is (again, the Katharine Gibbs School seems to have rather more than its fair share of dumb vendors). But I digress. . . .

Anyway, in my experience, when someone signs up for something and gives the wrong address, many sites -- the ones that don't understand double opt-in -- do one of three things. These lame outfits either, 1) just start sending their fetid, turgid ramblings (really annoying) or, 2) send me a message saying that I have requested to receive their fetid ramblings.

At this point, if the site really wants to tick me off they can offer me an unsubscribe service that requires I send a message requesting removal from the account they sent the message to in the first place.

This is, of course, a huge pain because I get all messages sent to gibbs.com. So I either have to send the cease-and-desist message or set up yet another filter to kill their messages on receipt. I already have an ungodly number of filters under Outlook 2000, and as they don't seem to be reliable I prefer not to push my luck (have you seen the same problem?).

The third choice for these sites is to invite me to go to their Web site and deregister using the password I set up for the account. Terrific! I don't think I need to go into exactly why this is problematic. . . .

So let me explain how double opt-in works: When a user thinks he is opting-in to a mail list and enters his address on some site, the site should send a message to the address saying that if the recipient wishes to subscribe to the list, he should reply to enable the account.

The sender should then wait for perhaps as much as a couple of weeks for a reply and, if received, start the account. If no reply is received within the timeout period the site should then purge the account or the e-mail address.

Unfortunately, this methodology seems to be beyond sites such as classmates.com, which offers you a link to the unsubscribe page on its Web site that requires you to log on to modify the account, and if you forget your password you get a link to have your password mailed to you, so you have to wait for that message, then go back to the site, log on and . . . well, they just don't get it.

I'll bet you have found the same problem with many sites, so here's the plan - send me the sites that, like classmates.com, don't get it and explain what the site does wrong. I'll start compiling a list of offenders and we'll begin to hassle them. It's for their own good.

Network World