Email users can ease clutter by ‘opting-out’

A few days ago I was the recipient of a polite email from a doctoral candidate at a reputable journalism school. This email asked me to participate in a survey regarding the effects of social media on newsrooms. From this innocuous message, a trail of nearly 50 replies indicated a clear ignorance of the “opt-out” function.

Opt-out, which is the ability to instruct the sender never to send you another email, is required by law as established by the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act of 2003. Opt-out is one of the main tenets called out in the act. As such, it is in every legitimate commercial email sent since the act was established.

In the old days, before CAN-SPAM was enacted, all opting-out did was take you off one list and put you on another. Nowadays opting out of a legitimate organization’s email list is typically successful. Most every reputable organization has a true opt-out function that allows you to decline future emails.

While not a commercial message, and thus technically not governed by CAN-SPAM, the aforementioned survey request clearly displayed an opt-out selection. After all, even if the message is not commercial in nature, the sender will be more successful following what are now well-established guidelines.

As such, I was both amazed and dismayed when replies to the initial email started coming in. This particular email was constructed using a list that appears to be purchased from a commercial purveyor of email addresses. Replying to the list resulted in a reply to everyone on the list.

The initial response was from a seemingly well-meaning recipient who attempted to correct grammar used in the survey. This was followed up with an apology for (1) providing an inaccurate correction and (2) replying to all.

Subsequently, nearly 50 replies were made to this email, the vast majority of which asked to be removed from the list. These replies came from editors, reporters and contributors from newspapers large and small. Some of the most prominent newspapers in the country were represented among the list of folks asking or, in many cases, demanding to be removed from the list. A handful of good Samaritans tried to explain how opt-out worked, but removal requests continued to come in.

So what was learned from this debacle? First, on the part of the sender, the email list should not have been listed as the main recipient in the “to” field of her email. Had the “bcc” field been used, no one would have been able to respond to the list.

Second, on the part of the list administrator, he/she should not have allowed responses to be sent to everyone on the list. This is an important question to ask for anyone buying email address lists. Many lists do not allow replies at all.

Finally, on the part of the recipients who replied, once they saw that replies were going to everyone, they should have stopped replying. While we are not sure how many folks were on this list, 50 replies are about 46 or 47 too many. Further, the repliers should have looked for the “opt-out” selection before basically demanding that someone else do something. Two clicks and typing in your name and email address would, in this case, have taken them off the list. Most opt-out functions are similarly simple.

John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at johnagsalud@yahoo.com.