In response to Stephanie Miller’s article below, Matt Blumberg continues the conversation and questions whether permission is as relevant as it once was in terms of how ISPs, filters, and blacklists determine whether or not to block mail. This is what he says:

"The argument against permission as a relevant filtering criteria is more nuanced:

1. It doesn’t matter if something is opt-out quadruple opt-in. Users think of spam as "email I don’t want," not "email I didn’t sign up for."  As Stephanie says, bad email I signed up for is even worse than unsolicited email in some ways.  And look at the other side of the argument as well:  would you really mind getting an unsolicited/unpermissioned email if the content or offer was highly relevant to you, e.g., you seriously consider clicking through on it?

2. Permission can be easily faked or loopholed. Companies can operate multiple web sites and email lists and gather addresses from multiple sources and then point to the one "proper permission site" and claim that’s the origin of all the names on its list.  And companies can set up privacy policies in such a way that they can automatically opt users into multiple lists without the user’s permission unless the user reads the fine print.

3. Permission is hard to measure. Besides the fact that
permission can be faked, the main way that blacklists and filters try
to measure permission is by looking at spam trap hits. Sometimes this
works — the cases where the spam trap addresses are newly-created
addresses that never sign up for lists. But most ISP and other spam
trap networks also include recycled email addresses as well —
addresses that were real and probably did sign up for email newsletters
and marketing at one point but have since gone inactive. Yes, a mailer
that hits this kind of spam trap address is probably guilty of sloppy
list hygiene and poor or nonexistent targeting and customer
segmentation. But does this mean they’re a truly egregious spammer?

4. Reputation trumps permission. The world of reputation systems
is driving quickly to the point where we can tell much more accurately
and automatically if a mail stream is "good" or "bad" as defined by
users in terms of complaints and as defined by infrastructure security,
authentication, and various other metrics.

So where I come out on this is that permission is FAR LESS RELEVANT than it used to be for receivers as filtering criteria, but probably not 100% irrelevant yet.
Perhaps in a couple years as reputation data-driven filtering becomes
refined and the norm, we will be able to be more accepting of highly
targeted and relevant unsolicited email (as we are sometimes with
highly targeted and relevant postal mail), but I’m not sure the world
is psychologically there just yet. There’s still too much egregious
spam in the inbox, and as a result, while users primarily think of spam
as "email I don’t want," they also do still think of spam as "email I
didn’t ask for."

But for now, senders can certainly rely on permission — if and only if
it’s up to date and contextual — as "first pass" screen on relevancy."

Thanks for the insights, Matt!