I got this today (actually, I got five of them). Given I’ve posted about email being broken, an idea for better email unsubscribing, and the concerning fact that Microsoft confirms working email addresses to spammers, it’s probably incumbent on me to report good news, too.

There’s so much that’s right with the bounce-back below, it’s difficult to know where to start: but variously…

• it’s not in techy-speak, and is simple and easy to understand
• it gives the email address of the person I sent an email to (yay)
• it quotes the complete mail underneath this nice message
• it gently markets the station as well as explains the situation
• it even gives a way of contacting the station further

They’re a depressingly bright bunch, aren’t they?

Thanks for your e-mail - unfortunately it has not been delivered to (name removed)@virginradio.co.uk

You may know that Absolute Radio is the new name for Virgin Radio. It's the same great radio station, just set free!

Emails for Absolute Radio should now be sent to 'absoluteradio.co.uk', and not 'virginradio.co.uk', 'virginradio.com', 'virgin-radio.co.uk' or 'virgin-radio.com'.

So you'll need to update the email address you have just used and resend your message. You should change the '@virginradio.co.uk' part of the email address to '@absoluteradio.co.uk'.

If you have any further problems, please do not hesitate to call the Absolute Radio Service Desk on 0845 356 1111 selecting option 2.

Discover how we're changing radio - discover real music - and discover more award-winning presenters than anywhere else.

Absolute Radio - online - digital - 1215 AM/105.8 FM (London)

Photo: Kevin Steinhardt. Used under licence.

One of the problems of a website like Media UK is that it’s hard to really prove that something is what it seems.

As a person, when you register, Media UK insists on an ‘identity-verifiable email address‘. As a quick example: someone registering as “Terry Wogan” is probably going to be Terry if he’s registering at his @bbc.co.uk address, but probably not going to be reliably checked as Terry if he tries using terrywogan175@hotmail.com instead. This proves a moderately reliable way, if not foolproof, of showing that somebody’s claimed identity is the right one. It also proves a right pain. I don’t know of a better way of doing it.

For media organisations, it’s rather more difficult.

Interestingly, Media UK is being used as part of some fraudulent scams - where some organisations claim they’re running a magazine, we dutifully add the magazine to the directory, and they then use Media UK’s entry as proof that they’re a legitimate organisation. Clearly, this makes life rather difficult for Media UK, as well as its users. So, somehow, I need to work on a way of checking that a magazine is really a magazine.

A potential way of doing this is, I discover, the ISSN. The ISSN is a number given to many legitimate magazines, just like an ISBN is given to a book. With an ISSN, you get into the British Library, I guess, as well as get to form a sensible barcode for your product. Unfortunately, most people don’t publish their ISSN; but the ISSN is available from the barcode on the magazine. So, MacUser has an EAN13 barcode of 9770269327071 which results in an ISSN of 0269-3275, which is then findable on Google, and thus fairly verifiable. You might want to try my EAN13 barcode to ISSN script and see if it works for a magazine, or potentially a newspaper, that’s hanging around the house.

Finally, Media UK clearly also has this issue for radio and television. I’m guessing that an Ofcom licence number, and/or their MCPS/PRS licence numbers, are the way of adequately checking whether an organisation is correct. Does that make sense?

Potentially also, a company registration number mightn’t be a bad plan. The Webcheck system from Companies House works at least most of the time, and might be a quick way of checking who is company registration number 451593 I guess…

Thoughts?

Photo: Amaury Henderick. Used under licence.

My Gmail account has a “report spam” button. But not an unsubscribe button.

Instead, I need to go looking through the email for the unsubscribe link. Sometimes it’s at the bottom; sometimes not. Sometimes it’s missing. Sometimes it’s called ‘Change your settings’. Sometimes (like CBS’s email system) it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s an email link; sometimes it’s a link to a website that requires you to log in to change your settings; sometimes it’s a link that instantly unsubscribes you; sometimes it’s a link that takes you to a page that contains a link to unsubscribe.

It’s a mess, email lists. And clearly, I’d like to know which are email lists run by decent people, and which are run by charlatans who don’t understand how to run decent email lists.

So. Here’s a plan. RFC2369 allows you to set a way to unsubscribe, using the List-Unsubscribe header, which can contain either an email address or a URL which allows them to directly unsubscribe. Can mail programs simply look for this header and add an ‘unsubscribe’ button to the user interface? (If it’s an email address, it should silently send an email; if it’s a URL it should go to that URL?) That would be brilliant from a user point of view.

–

Media UK, the website that I run from home, sends 9,200 emails every day: either media jobs (it’s free to add a job, by the way) or media news.

As a reputable emailer, I’ve registered with both AOL’s postmaster service and Microsoft’s equivalent. Both forward emails from people that hit ‘report spam’ on my emails to me, so that I can manually unsubscribe them and ensure they don’t get any more email. It’s a tiresome job, taking ten minutes or so every few days, more where badly-behaved mailservers strip too much from bounced email.

As a reputable emailer, I also include an unsubscribe link in every email (which some services retain when bouncing mail back to me), and I also replicate this link using the RFC2369 List-Unsubscribe header, which allows me to unsubscribe people even if the mailserver strips the body from the bounce.

But surely AOL or Microsoft could implement a system where it automatically unsubscribes their users if they report me as spam, as long as I’m using a compliant List-Unsubscribe header? It would save me time, and make their users happier. It might also assist mail systems know what’s spam and what’s not: at least, to score RFC2369-compliant mailers a little more highly.

(As a by-the-way, Media UK uses double-opt-in, and has an unusually full and clear policy around email. Your comments on this, and the rest of that privacy policy, would be welcomed.)

Just like out of office replies are broken, so it would seem that list subscription similarly is. How can we change the world for the better?

Photo by ‘unsubscribe-me’. Used under licence.