Originally posted by Jarvi
Hate to put the devil’s advocate hat on as that’s normally Spear’s role but, MarinersFan, do you even look into whether the complaint is valid? It seems an easy way for me to complain about a ‘spammer’ and get them kicked out of your program.Don’t get me wrong, the 99% of my emails that are spam annoy the crap out of me, however, I’d hate to be found guilty because some-one doesn’t remember that they signed up to my opt-in list.
Your point is well taken .. but that is the trap we find ourselves in these days. Even legitimate opt-in email lists can generate spam complaints because people forget they signed up after a year or two.
But the problem for a casino operator is that if we get spam complaints from our ISP in Costa Rica we have to deal with it or they will shut down our website. That’s how an affiliate account gets shut down. If we get a single email from somebody complaining about “spam” we will check it out, but we will not automatically ban the affiliate.
In the case I mentioned above, our ISP received more than 6 spam complaints. The affiliate told me they sent out 500,000 emails. On a percentage basis, that is not very many. But it only takes a few complaints to get your site shut down these days because the ISP’s get pressured by their upstream bandwidth providers.
If the choice is between giving an affiliate the benefit of the doubt or risking our site being shut down, you can understand which option we are going to take.
Now, in the case of the affiliate I referenced above, I think he was just plain stupid. I don’t think he was deliberately spamming, he thought he was buying a legitimate opt-in email list. But the net result to us is the same. I have exchanged a few emails with him and I told him we may give him one last chance if he promises to NEVER use paid email lists again. And if we do give him another chance, he now knows that the “death penalty” is hanging over his head if he ever spams again.