Sex, Lies, and E-mail

Sorry, completely forgot to put this up on the blog last night.

I have a confession to make. I have never once purchased any products in response to an email advertisement. I know, as a young person living in this digital world this seems like a shocking announcement. My reasons for this are mostly based upon paranoia about opting in to just about anything. I worked as a fraud investigator for eBay.com for nearly a year in 2003. During that time I saw more phishing schemes perpetuated through email opt-in lists than anyone could believe. Not only that, I saw that many of these schemes were very cleverly put together and, if one is not careful, need very little from you to ruin your day. In fact the most successful scheme I came across involved posting links to inflammatory or inappropriate content on public sites like eBay, and then adding a very official looking complaint button at the bottom of the page. Clicking the button brought you to a prompt requesting your user name and password in order to lodge a complaint. Of course this lead to the poster gaining access to your account, after which they could use your account to run their more malicious schemes. So you can see why I would generally beware any opt in buttons that may lead to my personal information being available for someone to view. Furthermore, I have seen many reputable companies fall prey to having their email lists leaked or stolen, leading to floods of spam that can be very hard to escape from. Due to my habit of not ever opting in to any email marketing, I have thus had little reason to trust any ads I have received, as I know they were sent without my consent.
In order to make email marketing live up to its full potential, I believe it is necessary for a company to provide redundant opt-in and a legal disclaimer with customer acknowledgment that the customer’s email cannot be sold or given to other marketing agents. By redundant opt-in, I mean that I should be first given the option to click on a box stating that I want to receive ads, after which an email should be sent to me requesting confirmation of my opt-in. This insures that I don’t get signed up for something accidentally, which will poorly color my opinion of the company and their ads from that point onward. As far as the legal disclaimer goes, the clause stating that my information will remain private should be presented in a summarized form with a check box next to it to ensure that I understand that signing up for the ad program is safe.