OTHER IMPORTANT SUBJECTS - COVERED IN DEPTH

Unsolicited Email (Spam) Complaints:

No matter how many precautions you may take, such as requiring your subscribers to "double opt-in", you will receive some spam complaints. These can be from people that simply forgot they did in fact request to receive your ezine, or product information, and upon receipt of your email, view it as outright spam.

It is very important that you keep a copy of every single "subscribe me" request that you receive. I think a lot of companies include this notice at the end of the email they send out, but may not in fact actually have the original request on file. Always keep these, because you'll never know when you will need them!

If someone who opted in to your mailing list sends a spam complaint to an organization like Spam Cop, what happens is this:

Spam Cop requires that the person first sign up with them, for a free account, if they aren't a member already. Once the person has signed up, they can report the spam in one of two ways.

They can use the form provided on the spam cop website, or, send the offending email, with FULL headers, to spamcop@spamcop.net

I believe at that point (having never used Spam Cop personally) Spam Cop sends them back a reply email, which allows them to add some comments to the complaint such as "I did subscribe to this ezine, but my repeated attempts to unsubcribe were ignored", or, "I never asked to receive this information from xxx company". When they've completed the form, and have pasted in both the FULL email headers, and the body of the message, they send it back to Spam Cop, so they can start to take action on behalf of the recipient.

When managing your online business, you probably won't have time to report all the junk mail you will receive as spam. It's much easier to send the unread letter straight to the trash!

Since most spam contains a URL for a company offering products or services, what Spam Cop does is goes to that domain, and scours the site, for any email addresses or domain names they can find. (I am not entirely sure if that is correct, but I believe that is how it works.)

They look for things such as hosting company URLS, payment processing company urls, autoresponder services, and anything else they can find, for companies that are providing the alleged spammer with a service.

Once they've found that, they then send an email to all the service providers, indicating that their customer is sending unsolicited email.

This prompts the service providers to contact your company, with a letter similar to this:

When you receive a notice of this nature, you must act on it immediately.

Find the original "subscribe me" request by searching on the email address for the alleged spam recipient, and AFTER you have removed the person from every single mailing list you have, then send a reply email to Spam Cop, AND your service providers, which includes the notice of removal, and a copy of the original subscribe request.

Indicate the person did in fact opt in, or ask to receive your information, and you have provided proof. Also tell them that the person has been removed from your mailing list.

Obviously when your hosting company is threatening to shut you down, it is not good for business. If your hosting company receives too many complaints against you, they will shut down your account!

Once your hosting account is terminated, you won't even be able to access your FTP server, and none of your customers will be able to access your site. If your autoresponder service shuts you down, you lose your customer list. If your payment processing system shuts you down, you won't even be able to take orders once you have moved your domain. In some cases, the hosting company will charge you a "clean up" fee, for clearing off your server.

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IF YOU OPERATE YOUR OWN RESELLER PROGRAM, THE CHANCE OF RECEIVING SPAM COMPLAINTS IS MUCH, MUCH HIGHER!

If you already have, or are creating your company Reseller Program, make sure you include something similar to the following, in the Reseller Program Agreement which should be required reading prior to anyone joining.

No Spamming:

As an affiliate member, please be aware that promoting our products, or company name via unsolicited email is absolutely forbidden. This also includes posting to Newsgroups, and the use of FFA (Free for all) pages, in ANY manner.

Breaking this agreement will result in the termination of your account, and any, or all commissions owing will be withheld.

Of course you may word your agreement in any way you like, and the above noted is simply a sample notice.

What happens if your affiliate member is accused of spamming?

If a member of your affiliate program is accused of spamming, the circumstances surrounding the issue will be pretty much the same as if you had done it yourself.

Your hosting company doesn't care whether or not it was you, or one of your affiliate members. The fact remains that the domain name included with the spam letter is hosted on their server.

They will send you a warning, similar to this:

Please advise your customer that spamming is not allowed on our network. If your customer continues with this practice we won't have any other choice but to disable the domain.

When you receive a spam complaint, regarding unsolicited email being sent out by one of your resellers, here is what you have to do:

If the complaint was sent from Spam Cop, you should contact all service providers included in the complaint, and inform them that you are taking immediate action in this regard. Explain to them that the person is a reseller for your company, and that you will fully investigate and deal with the problem right away.

If the spam complaint was forwarded by the actual email recipient, and not done on behalf of any anti-spam organization, then you must contact that person, and inform them that spamming is not permitted by your company, and that you are taking immediate action against the offender. Assure them that you will do everything you can to prevent their receiving any further email from this person, and that, as a result of their actions, their reseller priveleges may be revoked.

IF the person that forwarded the spam to your company did NOT include the full email headers, you must email them back, and ask them to forward the email again, with the full headers intact. You may need them to help identify the spammer.

Once you have the original spam letter in your possession, you should read it thoroughly to make sure it was definitely sent unsolicited.

Included in the body of the letter will either be the actual reseller URL, or a domain name of their own, which leads to a site that DOES contain the reseller URL.

Many people that purposely spam others don't include their reseller link in the body of the email. They use a "fly by night" domain, that they get for free, and on that site, you will usually find a redirect script that hides their actual URL.

Because many redirect scripts change the page very quickly, you only have a few seconds to get to view the source code, which WILL contain their Reseller ID number.

Here's what you do.

Click the link in the body of the unsolicited email, and immediately once the page starts opening in your browser window, get ready to RIGHT CLICK and click on "VIEW SOURCE", from the drop down menu, like this:

If you're not fast enough, and the page redirects too fast, just try it again, until you get it.

Once the source code opens up, you can then scan through it, for the URL, and ID number of the reseller. If the page contains a lot of code, you won't want to bother reading the entire thing, looking for the Reseller URL, so it's much easier to use the SEARCH function in Notepad, and search for your domain name.

Once you click FIND it, any reference to your URL will be highlighted in the source code. When you find the URL, simply look for the specific reseller ID number, as shown below.

When you have the ID number, check your adminstration area, to find the Resellers name, and email address.

Then, send them an email, similar to this:

If the person is not able to provide proof that the spam recipient asked to receive that information from them, then you will have to disable their reseller account, and inform them of this, by email.

If they are able to provide proof, you must forward that to the person who complained, and, if they used Spam Cop, or something similar, send them a copy too, with an explanation that the email was not spam.

If your policy is to withhold reseller commissions in a case like this, make sure to inform whoever takes care of paying your resellers, and inform them NOT to pay on this account.

The AssocTrac software is really great to have in this case, as it allows you to DISABLE a reseller account with the click of a mouse button, and include a note, as to the reason why. Then, all you have to do is contact whoever takes care of paying your resellers, and tell them to watch for DISABLED accounts, prior to creating checks for that month.