Contradictions

In the span of 48 hours the following two things happened.
Josh Baer posts over on deliverability.com about GoDaddy’s policies and recommends no email marketer use GoDaddy as a registrar because they are so hostile to email marketing that they charge customers for complaints. To quote Josh:

Apparently GoDaddy is now charging for handling spam complaints and has a $200 “spam tax” for clients that do email marketing. If they receive spam complaints against you, they are claiming that they will hold your domain ransom unless you pay $75 to release it.
Basically, GoDaddy is saying that if you do email marketing or have affiliates that send emails linking to your site, they don’t want your business.

I received mail from one of the volunteers working for a public, IP listing service about a client of mine using GoDaddy as a registrar.

[…]domains are registered through Godaddy, not really a reassuring sign.

In the course of that 48 hours I was directly told that GoDaddy is a registrar used by spammers while simultaneously someone else was claiming GoDaddy is hostile to any mailers. One of these things is not like the other things. One of these things just doesn’t belong.
This is just one example of groups with different agendas having contradictory opinions. The challenge is sorting out which group is the more representative view of a sender’s target market and how much influence they hold over people handling the mail servers of that target market.

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Fast forward 4 years and I once again have a customer blocked by Postini.  Usually, I tell customers there is nothing to be done for Postini blocks and that no one can find any information about them, but this customer is insistent. This particular customer has extremely clean mailing practices, sends highly relevant and wanted mail and consistently gets 95+% inbox delivery. They are not spammers, not even a little bit. Because I know this customer is so clean, I poked around a little to find some information about them. They do use the ReturnPath Mailbox Monitor so I have a copy of the headers Postini is adding. I also discovered that Postini is now providing a decoder service for their headers at https://www.postini.com/support/header_analyzer.php
The response you get back from pasting in a header is not that useful if you have found any of the numerous explanations of Postini headers, but it does show some willing. Note, there is no way to ask a question or provide feedback to Postini on the listing.
There is not much that can be done to deal with Postini filtering your email. The best you can do is have your recipients whitelist you.
[1] I believe I am the only person on the delivery end that has ever been able to actually talk to a live human at Postini, and I think that is only because I called them from the same area code they are in and some engineer decided to return the message I left on their corporate voicemail.

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