I normally use several e-mail accounts for work and for personal issues. One of my personal e-mail accounts is from Gmail, one of the most widely used free e-mail providers.
GMail has more than 146 million monthly active users, and it’s only the third largest provider, behind Hotmail (343 million) and Yahoo (285 million). So, as you can imagine, the chance of someone having an email address very similar to mine is huge.
Each week I receive a lot of email that is not targeted at me, but is received in my Gmail account. I receive newsletters, party invitations, invoices, business documents, passwords to access all sort of on-line accounts, and so on. All this crappy e-mail annoys me a lot, and what is worst, when I try to unsubscribe to some of these newsletters, there is no option at all to do it :-(
This kind of problem arises from bad practices building subscription lists. We’ve already written about the problems of single opt-in. This bad practice is not only terrible for the owners of e-mail accounts (as myself, as yourself), but for marketers too, because you can contribute to mail bombing, or see how your e-mails are trapped by spam filters if a competitor or cracker subscribes honey-pot addresses to your list.
So, if you are using building a subscriber list in your site, please, please, please, use double opt-in. It’s good for you and it’s good for innocent people like me who are blasted every day with tons of emails aimed at other people :-)
MAILCast, of course, has built-in support for double opt-in signing, allowing you to decide the exact contents of each step involved in the process.