Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The question that still lingers in my mind is from a user’s point of view, people are getting signed-up for newsletters by marketeers left, right, and center. I get signed-up for random email newsletters all the time that I have not signed up for. This is becoming a standard practice in the email marketing industry. You find email addresses and you just sign them up. It’s hard to keep up with this level of random emails. I can just see how, in 10 years, this is going to be a lot more. That’s one issue that bothers me.

On the counterpoint of this is, as an email marketeer, I run a company that uses email marketing. If there’s an automated system that blocks all emails, that makes me feel very uncomfortable because then our messages don’t get through to the people that we need to get through to.

Georges Lotigier: We never block automatically. The reality is that the user chooses to unsubscribe when he considers that the email bothers him. It is a real unsubscription, like the one a human does when he clicks unsubscribe. The difference is that it is automated. It’s better for me to receive this information than to never know because it’s blacklisted. It’s interesting for the end user and it’s interesting for the sender. We never block automatically. It’s always by the end user. What we do automatically is to consider that that mail is a spam.

Sramana Mitra: If something feels like spam, then you automatically get rid of it.

Georges Lotigier: Yes. We have an intelligence process which knows exactly what to do. It’s not exactly artificial intelligence, but it’s comparable to machine learning. The machine learns how to do the unsubscription even the ones that includes CAPTCHA. When it’s not possible, we try to send an invitation to the sender of the email – the marketing company – and explain that there are benefits for being compatible with our technology. We think that the user has to keep the control on the mailbox. If not, the mailbox will die. The future of the email ecosystem is dependent on technology’s ability to secure it. We have to help users in this field and go further than that by classifying and managing information.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro
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