What do I do with all of these challenge responses?

Anonymous Blackbaud User

SpamArrest falls into a category of systems known as "challenge-response" ... the first time you email someone, it holds your message and sends you a notice instead. The idea is that the task that it asks you to complete (fill out this form, whatever) can only be completed by a human and thus the subscriber is pretty much protected from spam.

These systems do not interact well with email marketing - users sign up for newsletters and then forget to whitelist the organization in their SpamArrest or similar system, and so the emarketer ends up dealing with them.

You have a choice as to whether to respond to these or not, and it's a business decision - most of our clients calculate that each email susbcriber is worth between $1.00 and $1.50 in terms of their potential to become a future donor, and thus it's worth spending an hour or two a week to wade through and reply to these.

As to your comment that people were "in your database", I presume that they got in there by opting in for email at some point in the past, in which case that's OK, but it would be inadvisable to email people who gave you their address because they e.g. donated online and weren't given an opportunity to opt in or out of email - that would be spamming, and while spamming is not against the law**, you don't want to damage your organization's emailing reputation with major ISPs like AOL.

The form of legal contact in the challenge-response email is a recent innovation - I would not be concerned about it. It seems to me like a silly innovation, because spammers won't see it or won't care, and it will scare off legitimate senders. Just for curiosity, I plan to ask Convio's counsel if it's even enforceable; I suspect not.

• • Many people assume the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 made spam illegal; it did not. CAN-SPAM merely requires that you stop spamming people if they ask you to, it doesn't mean you can't start.