Who inspires you? What ideals drive you to be successful or accomplish something you didn’t think possible? Whether it’s a personal or professional goal, we all need something to light the fire under us. Maybe it’s a doctor giving you an early warning about your health or maybe it’s the bully on the playground who said you were a “baby,” whatever spurs you on — find it and cherish it.
For many of us it’s finding someone who says “you can’t do that,” or “that’ll never work.” They may be right but most of us who’ve made our mind up about something are driven to prove this person wrong. As a child, hearing those words fires you up but somewhere along the way those “incentivizing” words have the opposite effect. We start doubting ourselves and our abilities and many of us allow those people to drive our own failure but at some point you step up and you realize that you are in charge of your own success. Success in life is not measured the same way it is in school with a prepared curriculum and measurement of concept understanding. You can fail and still (ultimately) succeed.
Embrace the person who tells you you’re doing it wrong. Cherish the board member who says, “We’ve never done it that way. It won’t work.” Value the person who speaks in absolutes. And then work your hardest to prove them wrong.
Christina G. Smith is the Director, Content and Client Marketing at YourMembership.com. She believes in a creative approach to problem solving and hates the words "we've always done it this way" used in that order.
That’s a remarkably timely blog post, given that I was made aware of your existence by spam sent on behalf of one of your customers through your mail system, with links to their website which is hosted on your facilities. How they got my address and why they assumed that I would want mail about an association I care nothing about, I can’t know.
As someone who has dealt with email permissions issues professionally for nearly 2 decades, I am here to tell you: YOU ARE DOING IT VERY WRONG. The problems with this mailing started with the fact that they never should have had my address in the first place, but it was compounded by additional problems:
1. The first contact they made was a pitch for an event. It offered no clues as to why they thought (perhaps innocently, perhaps foolishly, likely BOTH) that I was someone to be mailed by them for any reason at all. First email contact should ALWAYS be a confirmation of the address as belonging to someone who wants to be sent further email.
2. The message included a link “to update your email preferences” which redirected to their home page without showing any sign of doing anything. Was I unsubbed? Maybe. There’s no way for me to know.
3. The mail and web facilities used and pointed to in the spam live in Time Warner/RoadRunner network space without proper SWIP or rwhois records and have names in the ymem.net domain which lacks a registered abuse contact or working MX. This makes you and your customers look sleazy, plus it means the first place they will complain about spam is not to you, but at best to your connectivity provider.
4. You are sending mail with an arbitrary customer address used as the SMTP envelope sender. This makes it very likely that if they have a SPF record in DNS which has a “fail” or “soft fail” default, the mail you send for them will get it.
Because you act as a sole source for your customers, providing hosting, tools, and expertise, these are not just their problems, they are YOUR problems. Will abuse@rr.com get enough complaints to cut your connection off? Probably not. Will enough people report spam coming from ymem.net machines with links for ymcdn.com tracking bugs to public reputation systems and filter providers to cause real trouble? Probably not in the near term. Have people reported spam to their own mail providers adequately to make those aspects fodder for spam filters? YES. That’s something you may not notice until it is a big problem, but it is already reducing your deliverability a little.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I would appreciate if you could let me know which customer list you would like to be removed from. You can reply to me directly at csmith@yourmembership.com. Thank you.
Specifics sent and auto-reply received…
If you believe my purpose in responding was to get one de facto spam-trap address removed from one badly-managed mailing list, you’ve missed my point.
You may also use your own internal monitoring that you can fully integrate with our API.