For some time now I have contended that Confirmed Opt-in, 'COI' is dead, or at the very least on life support. It certainly is not a major factor in the continued relation between sender and receiver; that relies far more heavily on the ongoing and historical reputation of the mailer and the mail stream. Proof of permission doesn't scale; end-users complain all the time, but it is rare if not impossible for a receiving site to request proof when an end-user complains, then the receiver complains to the sender, and the sender says that permission was actually in place. Much more commonly, the sender unsubscribes the address and moves on, permission or not, since the subscriber doesn't want the mail any more.

But then, I recently had two eye-opening experiencee as to exactly why Confirmed Opt-in is critical to the email whole equation.

As you probably know, CAUCE recently had some major news, we announced it here on our website and we also did a mailing to our membership lists. One email resulted in someone challenging us on their subscription – the subscriber instisted he had never signed up to our lists and was pretty upset.

We pulled out his Confirmed, ‘Double’ Opt-in record, showed him the date and time he asked to be subscribed, and the time and date he clicked through on the confirmation mail.

If somebody offers to sell you a bulk list of 'opt-in' email addresses, you're almost certainly getting a spam list. What you're going to receive from them is a list of addresses belonging to people who have not agreed to receive messages, or a list that's been mailed to so often that it is no longer useful to other mailers. To put it another way, whatever they might have opted into, it wasn't mail from you.

As a sender, it is your job to confirm that your list is truly opt-in. Where do you begin? Doing your homework saves headaches later - headaches driven by poor results, spam complaints, blacklisting, wasted time and money, and bad PR. In other words this is not a responsibility you can shirk by saying 'I have no way of knowing how accurate or authentic these names are' or 'They guy from the list rental organization says it's opt-in'.

It's your responsibility to know about the names your communicating with. Sending unsolicited commercial email will bring a number of problems to your email program, to mention a few; Major DNSBL listings and ISP blocking, recipient complaints, and a negative sender reputation

Governments are catching up with spam laws, but sadly many have not legislated this yet. Canada has no spam laws, even though the "Federal Anti-Spam Task Force" recommended this in 2004. Country specific laws can be found at Spamlaws.com

The United States has legislated email with CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) in 2003. This law require several elements of a commercial email message conform to a minimum set of standards. Here is a rundown of the law's main provisions:

Unsolicited bulk e-mail that complies with these rules is legal under CAN SPAM, even though such UBE is widely considered to be spam.

The Internet community is also working on several global initiatives to help stem the tide of unsolicited commercial email, CAUCE recently endorsed the Senders BCP published by MAAWG, written mostly by Email Service Providers with input from ISPs, Corporations and RBL providers.

Most ESPs and ISPs have policies in place that prevent their users from sending spam, however not all of these policies are correctly enforced. Many times spam activity continues because there are no complaints being sent to an ESPs or ISP, or these complaints are being ignored by the abuse desk staff.

If your ESP or ISP is supporting spam by playing ignorant, you may begin to have issues with your own email. Moving to a new provider that has a strong anti-spam policy is your best option.

There are several initiatives in progress to help with this growing problem, these include;

• Email authentication and reputation services
• ISP filtering of inbound and outbound email, port 25 (mail transport service) blocking
• The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has ISPs, anti-spam solutions and Large Commercial email marketers working together to build best practices and share information on spam issues.