Forum Moderators: skibum
While cleaning out my spam filter, I stumbled upon an interesting looking spam. For grins and giggles, I checked out one of the links in the spam. It was clearly an affiliate link to a website that looked fairly innocent, with no prior e-mail spam reports against it in the normal channels.
Of course, within an hour, the site was down because the anti-spammer vigilantes have called the host and reported the incident. The host wants to get the site down quickly, as they don't want to be tagged as a spamhaus and have their IP blocks listed in the various blacklists (which could have a HUGE impact on their other customers).
The merchant is clearly innocent in this situation. But they'll get smacked bad here.
So, merchants - what are you doing to avoid this? The anti-spammers are quick and nasty. Is there a good way to protect against this? I can't think of any from a technical perspective, and this really scares me. :-/
Keeping a close eye at your bounced emails -if you run a newsletter- and monitoring referrals from your webmasters will help you be alert of any problems.
Bottom line: more corrective measures than preventive ones. The great majority of affiliates will not spam. And those who incurr in potentially negative behaviour will modify it upon notice. Thus, it is easy to spot who is creating trouble (and ban).
If you reach this stage, you can always publish the incident on your program as a way to inform webmasters you will take swift action.
The only thing you can do is forbid it and come down hard on those who do it.
Note: I'm not talking about SE Spam, just Email spam.
Even the lawsuit thing doesn't scare me too much. Honestly, I think that you'd have to be at a super-extreme before lawsuits get involved.
But I know the anti-spam crowd from running an ISP for a number of years. And I know upstreams. And when it comes to e-mail spam, it's pull the plug first and ask questions later. You can (but not always) get smacked for 48 hours or so while everything is sorted out.
That can hurt a merchant. And what if it happens more than once?
Maybe I'm just paranoid... but it does scare me.
I would hope so or else there wouldn't be any affiliates left :)
1) Affiliate links or ads can't be used in e-mail.
2) Affiliates who violate the agreement will forfeit all monies due them.
Spamming with an affiliate code is of necessity so overt, and the delay before a check is issued is so long, that it's hard to believe any potential spammer could really expect to get away with it - as long as a strong antispam policy is clearly spelled out to all affiliates.
Another more draconian method would be to only allow affiliates to post affiliate links on approved websites and reject any click-through that does not have the appropriate referrer information, or at least flag referrer hits that are not correct.
Most importantly have a good tracking system and record keeping system will be useful for both terminating affiliates that violate your terms but will aid you in defending your practices if someone spasm in your name.
