Who's Your Daddy? Your Client's Domain May Be At Ransom

The web has been recently abuzz when some light was shed on web registrar, GoDaddy.com, on abuse complaints stemming from email marketing. And its a real BIG DEAL to legitimate email marketeers and email service providers like Blink Campaign (Heck, our domain is registered with GoDaddy!).

So what's the big deal? For a start, GoDaddy is one of the premiere domain registrars for the web. A good bunch of our own clients are on GoDaddy. Now get this:

• Your client has their domain registered with GoDaddy
• Your client uses a third party email marketing service (namely you, the external online marketing/design agency) to advertise their GoDaddy registered site.
• IF there are any spam complaints from any campaign sent that go to GoDaddy, Go Daddy will charge you a "spam complaint management fee" of a whopping $200!
• AND if due to the above, your client decides to leave GoDaddy for another registrar, GoDaddy will hold your domain ransom until a "release fee" of $75 is paid off to them!

If you want to do legitimate email marketing for your GoDaddy registered site, GoDaddy doesn't want to have anything to do with you.

These are all highlighted in their "Abuse Enforcement Program". Here is an excerpt:

If you agree to the terms of the "Abuse Enforcement Program" outlined below, Go Daddy will accept, in good faith, your commitment as proof of your desire to correct this problem and enforce our anti-spam policy.

"Abuse Enforcement Program" terms are as follows:

1. Authorize GoDaddy.com to charge a $199 non-refundable administration fee* to the credit card on file for your account. This fee is used to cover the costs of responding to or "cleaning up" the outstanding spam complaints Go Daddy has received against your domain name so far.
2. Terminate the services you are providing to the organization circulating the mailing that has generated the complaints we have received.
3. Reply to this message with a statement that you will terminate the services of any future client that violates Go Daddy's No Spam policy.
4. Provide both a primary contact and secondary contact email address.

GoDaddy sure tried to pull a quick one with their "Abuse Enforcement Program". Serious ESPs (Email Service Providers, like Blink Campaign) simply call this abuse management, and its an IMPLICIT service to our users for us to manage abuse complaints. Hey, we ARE dealing with humans here, and an occasional complaint is very commonplace. How many times has one of your recipients actually unsubscribed or reported spam on your newsletter simply because they had forgotten they signed up in the first place? And on top of abuse management, we further try to educate our own clients and Blink Campaign users on best practises for email marketing, spam and deliverability issues and the works.

My opinion: let serious email marketeers and ESPs do their job, and registrars to do just theirs. Abuse handling should be done by the same guys sending out the so-called "abusive" emails. As though fighting spammers and daily deliverability ain't enough, we've got to start dealing with registrars like GoDaddy too.

Perhaps I should just get back to the old fashioned medium of print design. No?