Ouch! Leading industry publication DM News (who publish iMarketingNews) just shot themselves in the foot. They're renting their opt-in email list out to various vendors. This isn't a mistake. The mistake is the "From" line on the messages. The message I just got said it was from "Edith Roman".

This is a fairly common mistake these days, so let me clear it up. According to focus group results, up to 50% of email recipients look at the "from" line to decide whether or not they will open an email or delete it. If the "from" line is not from someone they remember asking to get email from, many will promptly assume that company is spamming them -- even if it's not officially spam. In the world of spam, everything is in the eye of the beholder.

When you rent a list, the "from" line should be the brand name or company name that the opt-in names will remember as the place or company they gave permission to email them from. Your only other choice -- and this falls into the debatable grey area -- is a brand name that's really, really famous, so recipients would be inclined to trust and open email from that brand even though they can't remember asking for that brand to email them personally.

In the case of this campaign, The smarter bet would have been to use a From line saying, "DM News."