CONTENT OR CONSENT Why Your Email Is Being Blocked
by James Jaeger
On March 3rd I hired Constant Contact -- a professional email marketing agency -- and through them sent out a Progress Report to our "opt-in" email list of 5000 people. At the top of the Report I specifically asked recipients to please unsubscribe if they didn't want further emails from me. Instead of unsubscribing, 64 people maliciously filed an abuse report knowing this would get me in trouble with Constant Contact. Sure enough my account was suspended and I may get kicked off Constant Contact for the second time in 3 years. Here's what happened.As noted, 64 people -- most likely Trump haters or hard-core, brain-dead Lefties -- maliciously filed "Spam Reports" on my Progress Report of 3 March 2022. Specifically, Constant Contact's "spam policy" is that if even 1 out of 1,000 people file a "Spam Report," that's enough to warrant suspension or termination of the entire account. And this is what happened to us, twice.
One could easily write this off to the theory that some people simply do not want to receive our emails. And that's fine: 140 out of 5,000 people DID unsubscribe from our March 3 mailing. But it's untrue that most "do not want to receive our emails" because Constant Contact's servers registered an "open rate" of 20%. Someone wanted them. Over a thousand people wanted them and the reason is: our email lists are generated by people who went to our "opt-in" site -- at www.HomeVideo.net -- and consented to be on our list in exchange for getting to watch movies for free. Check it out if you don't believe me -- go to www.HomeVideo.net and opt-in.
Constant Contact, and all email marketing firms, claim that policing email for "spam" is about CONSENT, not CONTENT. In other words, we were flagged NOT because the content of my Progress Report of 3 March 2022 happened to promote the production of a new libertarian/conservative-leaning motion picture entitled "SPEECH - The Door Is Closing," but because we sent out 5,000 emails to a "dirty list" and 64 people filed a "Spam Report." So in Constant Contact's mind, I was flagged for consent, not content? Hard to tell, but consider this:
My Progress Report of 3 March 2022 was designed specifically to garner consent. In the very first sentences of the Report I asked people to please "unsubscribe" if they didn't wish to receive further emails. I also specifically asked them to NOT file an abuse report; just unsubscribe and Constant Contact will immediately remove them from the list. Here's the exact language I used in the Progress Report:
"Dear Production Associate, We have just signed up with CONSTANT CONTACT because our email list has grown to a point whereby it needs professional management. If, for any reason, you do not wish to be on this list you can UNSUBSCRIBE by clicking on the link below. CONSTANT CONTACT will unsubscribe you immediately. Please do NOT just hit the ABUSE button as this will NOT remove you from the subscription list and it actually generates "abuse" for system administrators who must then address "abuse queries" that are really Unsubscribe Requests. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated."
As noted above, this Progress Report went out to 5,000 people yet -- in spite of my earnest and sincere request to unsubscribe them if further emails were not wanted -- 64 people STILL filed "Spam Reports". Is this really about CONSENT, or is it more about CONTENT? More specifically, is it about REVENGE or PUNISHMENT for sending out certain unwanted content? It was about the later.
Again, Constant Contact's policy states that when even 1 out of 1,000 emails are reported as "spam," this triggers an automatic suspension of the account and a review by their compliance officer. I went through this review with 3 of Constant Contact's staff for over 3 hours. Although they were cordial and helpful, they said their policy was firm so they suspended my account. Since I could not provide enough documentation to prove the emails were opt-in, my entire list of 5,000 was deemed "unclean" and deleted on the Constant Contact servers. Bear in mind I spent over 3 years generating this list and now it was useless. And this happened to me about 3 years earlier when I was a client of Constant Contact -- so I was being extra careful to generate a clean list.
Given these things, I have concluded that complying with Constant Contact's email consent policy is virtually impossible. It is virtually impossible to expect that fewer than ONE out of ONE THOUSAND people will complain because there are complainers all over society. These complainers are irascible, often unhappy souls, some of which feel entitled to special privileges and some who will scream abuse if you even sneeze.
Psychiatrists tell us that 1% of the population is psychopathic or has sociopathic-paranoid tendencies. This statistic alone indicates that at least 10 out of 1,000 people will file Spam Reports FOR NO REASON AT ALL. And what about lists that have 100,000 emails? Mathematical extrapolation tells us that 1 in 1,000 people, even 64 in 1,000 or 6,400 in 100,000 -- will file "Spam Reports" simply because they're mentally ill or "afraid of email" -- what's known as "spamaphobic."
The illness of spamaphobia is not yet defined in the psychiatric literature, but it's reasonable to speculate that at least some percentage of the population is paranoid, if not antagonistic about, not only so-called "unsolicited" speech, but especially unsolicited political speech. And this disorder could be termed spamaphobia.
Such speech, even if protected by the First Amendment, is often vilified as "spam" in order to "justify" its abridgement. Given this, it's easy to see how spamaphobia -- the fear of unsolicited political speech -- combined with draconian Spam Report policies, can be used as covert tools of institutionalized censorship. This censorship is not necessarily happening at the level of Constant Contact, for even this organization is under threat of censorship. Internet Spam Police, such as Spamhaus, SpamAssassin and the Google Corporation keep tabs on "spammers" even if they are American companies performing the age-old that practice known as "cold call sales." If Constant Contact were to use their servers to send a "dirty email list" to gmail users, for instance, they too would be shut down, or assigned a low Chinese "Reputation" number.
This is not theory, it happened to me. One day, about a year ago, I noted that about 40% of the emails on my list of 5,000 were being returned to me unopened. Almost all of the emails were to gmail users. I also noted that there was a message appended to each returned gmail, such message stating that the email was suspected of being "spam" and was therefore being returned by gmail. The message looked like this:
Google had censored all of my email to gmail users -- family, friends and associates -- in the name of spam! The above sample gmail happens to be to my son, hardly "unsolicited" or "spam." Again, the same thing could happen to Constant Contact (I was to learn in my talks with their compliance officers) unless they enacted the draconian compliance and documentation policies I related above. Constant Contact is terrified of tarnishing their mass email reputation and has thus adjusted their Spam Report threshold to the ridiculous level of 1 out of 1,000 people.WbjPenn@gmail.com host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [142.251.116.26] SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: 550-5.7.1 [192.142.167.19 12] Our system has detected that this message is 550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent to Gmail, 550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedMessageError 550 5.7.1 for more information. x3-20020a056830114300b005cb2fc137fdsi507686otq.121 - gsmtp
Such regulating entities, hiding behind the identity of "private companies" seem to be suppressing CONTENT -- politically "incorrect" speech -- in the name of policing CONSENT in order to save the world from the evils of "spam" as envisioned in the paranoid minds of the spamaphobic.
Given these liabilities to First Amendment rights, services like Constant Contact should consider changing their Spam Report policies. Sending out "cold call sales" is not spam -- it's an American tradition as old as Girl Scouts selling cookies door-to-door. Email marketing firms should change their speech-numbing "Spam Report" thresholds to levels more reasonable and they should disconnect from Email Police -- such as Spamhaus, SpamAssassin, Google and other CCP-style "Reputation" systems that are increasingly pervading the Internet and making it onerous for the 40 million small businesses across the nation to grow using cost-effective email technology to conduct "cold call sales" and general advertising.
It's unfair that large, left-leaning tech corporations and "big box" stores can "cold call sell" to American consumers with endless unsolicited TV commercials, unsolicited road-side bill boards and even unsolicited mass email mailings, but small businesses, especially right-leaning media firms, are subjected to endless opt-in documentation and Spam Report policies that amount to contracts of adhesion. All of this is high-tech speech abridgement in the name of "protection from spam."
The War on Spam has gone too far. The cry of "spam" is now being used to "justify" the wholesale censorship of libertarian, conservative and Christian content that is critical of the Globalist Agenda.
Censorship of CONTENT is being masked by a bogus concern for CONSENT. This is why your email is being blocked.
If you are in agreement with the points and issues discussed in this article, consider opting-into our 10 previous feature documentaries at www.homevideo.net and donating to the production of our 11th public service documentary film tentatively entitled "SPEECH - The Door Is Closing". The website is at http://www.theDoorIsClosing.us
ADDENDUM:
Today, 20 April 2022, I terminated my CONSTANT CONTACT account. Sending out any further lists, no matter how "opt-in" they were, would have resulted in further censored emails. Why waste the time writing something that will just be labeled "spam" and blocked.
I made suggestions to the CC agent and asked that they contact me if they change their ridiculous 1 in 1,000 Spam Report policy. I am not holding my breath.
Originated: 13 March 2022
Revised and Supplemented: 15 March 2022
Revised and Supplemented: 17 March 2022
Supplemented & Retitled: 24 March 2022
Supplemented: 20 April 2022
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