SenderScore update

Matt has posted a bit more about the SenderScore Blacklist, following up on my post about the changes at Comcast. George Bilbrey, VP and General Manager, for Return Path followed up with him to explain a bit more about the blacklist. George says:

  • The blacklist is based on more than the summary Sender Score on average, IPs on the blacklist have a score much, much less than 70.
  • There is not a direct relationship between the blacklist and Sender Score Certified.
  • You can’t buy yourself off the blacklist with Sender Score Certified and it is not possible to be on both the blacklist and qualify for SSC.
  • We don’t pitch any of our services to folks who have contacted us because they have been blocked.

Matt is looking for experiences from people. My experiences are as follows.

  1. My client that was blocked by Comcast, with the reject message referencing the SenderScore blacklist, had a SenderScore of 65.
  2. Comcast suggests that senders sign up for the Comcast FBL as part of the remediation for a SenderScore block. The Comcast FBL is a service provided by ReturnPath. During the signup process at a ReturnPath branded website, there is a note that says, “We may email you about your registration, service updates, and information on existing and new Return Path products.”

I know just how difficult it is to run a blacklist while offering services to those who are blacklisted. My first job in the delivery arena was trying to manage the services division at MAPS (now Trend Micro). MAPS was just offering a range of blacklists and outsourced abuse management services.
ReturnPath is offering a whole host of services. They are a reputation service, they are a blacklist service, they are a whitelist service, they are a FBL service. On top of all that, they are also an acquisition mailer and an email list provider.
Based on my own experience it is very difficult to sell services to companies that you are blacklisting. It is also difficult to sell services to companies you are directly competing with. It remains to be seen if ReturnPath can successfully manage such a diverse and conflicting range of services.

Success!
Happy New Year

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Greylisting: that which Yahoo does not do

Over the last couple days multiple people have asserted to me that Yahoo is greylisting mail. The fact that Yahoo itself asserts it is not using greylisting as a technique to control mail seems to have no effect on the number of people who believe that Yahoo is greylisting.
Deeply held beliefs by many senders aside, Yahoo is not greylisting. Yahoo is using temporary failures (4xx) as a way to defer and control mail coming into their servers and their users.
I think much of the problem is that the definition of greylisting is not well understood by the people using the term. Greylisting generally refers to a process of refusing email with a 4xx response the first time delivery is attempted and accepting the email at the second delivery attempt. There are a number of ways to greylist, per message, per IP or per from address. The defining feature of greylisting is that the receiving MTA keeps track of the messages (IP or addresss) that it has rejected and allows the mail through the second time the mail is sent.
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Blogroll

I added a few blogs to my blogroll today.
Terry Zink works at Microsoft handling spam blocking issues for one of their platforms. His posts offer insight into how recipient administrators view spam filtering. He has a long, information dense series of posts on email authentication.
E-mail, tech policy, and more is written by John Levine, a general expert on almost everything internet, especially spam and abuse issues. He posts somewhat irregularly about interesting things he sees and hears about spam, abuse, internet law and other things.
Justin Mason’s blog contains information from the primary SpamAssassin developer. Like Terry’s blog, it gives readers some insight into the thought process of people creating filters.
Al Iverson’s blogs have been on my blogroll for a while now. His DNSBL resource contains information about various DNSBL and how they work against a single, well defined mail stream. His spam resource blog provides information about delivery and email marketing from someone who has been in the industry as long as I have.
Email Karma is Matt Verhout’s blog and contains a lot of useful delivery information.
No man is an iland provides practical information on marketing by email. Some of the information is delivery related, a lot more of it is solid marketing information. Mark often points to useful studies and information posted around the net.
MonkeyBrains has always entertaining and informative articles about delivery, email marketing and practical ways to make your email marketing more effective.

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Wired editor has enough spam!

Seth Godin links to a post up over on The Long Tail about spammers who send PR mail to Chris Anderson, an editor at wired. Apparently lots of people send automated email to the editor of Wired hawking their latest and greatest product, service or photos.
In response to this overwhelming amount of mail, Chris has instituted a new email acceptance policy. He says

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