Questions and answers related to the operation, administration and depuration, when required, of mailing lists (or subscriber databases, as they're called sometimes). This last step is usually required by Cantv.net when list contamination is detected or when the level of complaints associated to the deliveries to such mailing list is unacceptable.
The references we've linked in our Documents and policies section are likely helpful too.
The contents of this question list are revised whenever new questions or doubts are identified in the communications with our users. Please carefully review the questions and answers that might be related with your doubts, as we've made an important effort to provide ample and complete answers.
If you do not find the answer you need in this site, please let us know by using the links at the end of each page.
- How should I make the deliveries to the list?
- I would like the subscribers to add themselves through a web page
- What is a subscription confirmation?
- What are periodic confirmations?
- What are acceptable mechanisms to handle unsubscriptions?
- When should I automatically cancel a subscription?
- Subscriber list trading
- How can I clean my recipient list?
- Why doesn't Cantv.net provide the addresses of the people who complained? Why does Cantv.net require that my list be cleaned?
- Why does Cantv.net recommend the use of plain text email instead of HTML?
- My messages cannot be considered spam because they include the text...
- Standard Email headers for list management
How should I make the deliveries to the list?
Depending on the amount of subscribers in your list and the magnitude of the mail platform serving them, the delivery of messages to the list might be a significant load, that might even interfere with the normal operation of the recipient's mail system. As a list operator, likely there is no way for you to know this.
The recommended action is to fraction the deliveries in manageable lots. We recommend this lots to be of up to 100 messages. It is also a good idea to get in touch with the administrators of a network or domain whenever a few hundreds of addresses delivered there are collected, in order to agree on an adequate mechanism for the delivery.
<<I would like the subscribers to add themselves through a web page
This is all right, as long as you guarantee that:
- The user has spelled her email address properly. You can do this by requesting that the user types in the address twice or presenting the user with the given email address and asking for confirmation.
- The given email
address
- You keep the activity logs for this operation, including the exact time and date, the source IP address and the added email address. Optionally you can also keep the value of the HTTP-Referrer header and the identification of the user's browser.
- Limit the maximum number of additions from a single IP address in a given period of time.
In general, you must implement controls that allow you to document the action and avoid abuse when third parties contaminate your list.
<<What is a subscription confirmation?
At the time of receiving an email address for addition to your list, there is no way to know if this request actually comes from the owner or user of said address.
To avoid adding email addresses without its owner's authorization, a plain text message must be sent to the candidate address, indicating that it is a confirmation for the subscription to a mailing list.
It's a good idea to include in this message, the control information about the request. For instance, source IP address, the headers in the original request and in general, any other datum that might be appreciated by someone whose email address is being used without his consent.
Only after receiving a positive response to the confirmation message, should a candidate email address be added to the mailing list. This positive response must be kept in your records as evidence.
It is recommended that confirmation messages include some security mechanism to avoid its forging. Tipically, random strings that can be verified upon reception of the answer and that change with each message, are the preferred choice.
It is also recommended that the confirmation process can be completed through email. In some cases, this is the only available mechanism.
It is important that if no answer to the confirmation message is received, the candidate address be discarded. Never subscribe and email address for which no positive confirmation exists.
<<What are periodic confirmations?
Those are confirmation processes that, as its name implies, are executed periodically on all the subscriptions in a list. The idea is to detect addresses that for whatever reason, could have changed owners and as a consequence, no longer belong to confirmed recipients. The rules for this process should be analogous to the confirmations sent prior to subscription of new addresses. The periodic confirmations have the advantage that when a user changes his email address in time, it is possible to unsubscribe him easily and with mimimal hassle, as his non-confirmation is enough to confirm his desire to not receive the information.
<<What are acceptable mechanisms to handle unsubscriptions?
Ideally, the unsubscription mechanism must depend exclusively on email. Must be simple, to make it accessible to all the users without regard to their level of expertise in the use of email tools.
Upon receiving an unsubscribe request, it is a good practice to confirm it, always through email. After obtaining such confirmation, the corresponding email address must be unsubscribed immediately ans sumarily.
Under no circumstances deliveries to unsubscribed addresses should continue or those addresses be included in the list again, without a new subscription. Also, it is not a good practice to give those addresses to third parties for inclussion in their own lists.
<<When should I automatically cancel a subscription?
Delivery failures along various deliver attempts are an indication that the email address is no longer valid and must be unsubscribed summarily and automatically.
When the SMTP session receives a permanent error, with a code starting with 5, the address must be unsubscribed immediately. This error indicates that the email address is not valid and that the email message won't be deliverable.
<<Subscriber list trading
You must never trade subscriber listings. The confirmation that a given user might have done, applies uniquely to the content that was offered at the time.
You must also excercise great care with the origin of the email addresses incorporated in your lists. In many cases, these addresses include well known spamtraps, which are used by operators such as Cantv.net to detect improper practices in list management.
<<How can I clean my recipient list?
For some people, the answer to this question is "by discarding the list and starting from scratch". However, in many cases the information sent to the mailing list may have value to some recipients. Simply discarding the list, may cause the sender to be forced to close its operation. In this respect, Cantv.net's position is more flexible.
The mailing list depuration required by Cantv.net, must consider the following:
- The default action is to unsubscribe the recipient: A basic principle of the respect for out users' mailboxes privacy is that If a user did nothing to subscribe to a mailing list, nothing must be done to unsubscribe from it. It is unfair that users that have done nothing wrong, have to pay with their time, efforts or money, the problems caused by the poor management of mailing lists of a third party.
- Regular mail deliveries must be stopped immediately after the confirmation notice: As long as the user has not confirmed his intent to remain in the list, no messages with the usual content must be sent.
- List depuration must not take excesive time: That is, we cannot allow a month to be employed in the depuration, as this is something that can easily be accomplished in a few days.
- Depuration cannot be the usual operation method of your list: Depuration is a one time measure, to correct historical deviations and bring the list to a situation of compliance. The periodic need to depurate a list, shows that the main objective which is to maintain the respect for the privacy, is not being achieved, so it is counterproductive to continue the process.
Our team frequently provides specific recomendations to the list operators, based on a detailed evaluation of the case.
<<Why doesn't Cantv.net provide the addresses of the people who complained? Why does Cantv.net require that my list be cleaned?
A very small proportion of the users that get an unsolicited message will actually complain. This does not mean that the recipient wants the material. Usually, this reflects the fact that many users:
- Are discarding or deleting your messages without reading them.
- Are not getting to see your messages, because the email address is not valid.
- Don't know how to complain.
- Don't want, can't or don't know how to request the unsubscription to the list.
Normally, when your deliveries produce complaints, those are interpreted as indicators of problems in the list management practices or in the source of the recipient list. If this is true, then a significant proportion of the recipients might have never requested to be in the list.
The cleaning of the list, allows for the confirmation of your subscriber base and document why each address is subscribed. Ideally, from that point on, it is possible to document the entry of each address.
All these benefits dissappear if we simple provide the list of addresses that must be removed, when the list management processes are not adequate. It might mean an improvement for the few users that complained, but for the many that didn't, the situation does not change.
On the other hand, Cantv.net has access to activity logs that show, among other things, the email addresses to which the list operator sent ise messages. If addresses that did not request the subscription are detected, it is likely that a depuration will be required to extract those addresses, as well as those from the users that might have been obtained in the same way.
<<Why does Cantv.net recommend the use of plain text email instead of HTML?
As odd as it might seem, some people automatically discard HTML messages automatically. Others consider the use of HTML in the email as a sign of unsolicited email. In other cases, the user accesses his email through devices that cannot properly show the HTML message.
The safest way to insure that your message is to be seen by the recipient, is to encode it so it is easier to read. This implies the use of plain text.
<<My messages cannot be considered spam because they include the text...
There is a misconception where including a text like the reproduced below, will render a message legit.
Under the provisions of U. S. Bill S. 1618 Title III, this letter is not spam and no further action can be taken by the reader against this company/person. Any report of this letter as spam to any independent agency or site is a violation of this law and will be dealt with promptly.
Actually, any unsolicited message sent in bulk, is spam without regard to the inclussion of this or a similar text. In fact, the inclussion of this or a similar text is often used as an indicator of unsolicited email. Some references to this topic can be found at:
Regardless of the previous explanation, you must always provide instructions for unsubscribing from your list list.
<<Standard Email headers for list management
Cantv.net uses the List-Ubsubscribe to recognize email messages processed through legitimate mailing lists, as explained in Información sobre sistemas de distribución masiva de correo.
The correct usage of this email header is described in RFC-2369 and RFC-4021.
We recommend the use of these headers with mailto: URIs to maximize the amount of recipients that can take advantage of them.
The pressence of these headers, modifies the way in which Cantv.net processes the complaints from its users. Additionally, this critaria is applied at other large ISPs.
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