Monitoring customers at ESPs

In the past I’ve talked about vetting clients, and what best effort encompasses when ESPS try to keep bad actors out of their systems. But what does an ESP do to monitor clients ongoing? Al Iverson from ExactTarget says that they:

Look at what clients are doing constantly. If too much of a client’s list is filtered out at import, If too much of their mail bounces, If they receive too many spam complaints from a large ISP, If they get blacklisted by a reputable blacklist like Spamhaus or Spamcop, Or if they do something that shows [ET] that they’re not complying with the opt-in consent requirements contained in [the] contract.

If any of those things happen, what happens next?

The client is funneled through a policy enforcement/best practices process to help address the issue, reform the process, remove the bad list, educate the client, and, if those steps all fail, terminate that client.

Read the rest of what Al has to say here:
http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/al-iverson/0/0/exacttarget-and-stopping-spam

AOL talks about reputation
Email news

Related Posts

SpamZa: corrupting opt-in lists, one list at a time

A number of ESPs have been tracking problematic signups over the last few days. These signups appear to be coming from an abusive service called SpamZa.
SpamZa allows anyone to sign up any address on their website, or they did before they were unceremoniously shut down by their webhost earlier this week, and then submits that address to hundreds of opt-in lists. This is a website designed to harass innocent recipients using open mailing lists as the harassment vehicle.
Geektech tested the signup and received almost a hundred emails 10 minutes after signing up.
SpamZa was hosted on GoDaddy, but were shut down early this week. SpamZa appears to be looking for new webhosting, based on the information they have posted on their website. 
What does this mean for senders?
It means that senders are at greater risk for bad signups than ever before. If you are targeted by SpamZa, you will have addresses on your list that do not want your mail. Some of those addresses could be turned into spam traps.

Read More

Appropriating reputation

One of the thing savvy spammers are doing these days is appropriating the reputation of someone else. Reputation appropriate takes many forms. Some spammers hijack windows machines, turn them into bots and send spam through major ISP smarthosts. “Legitimate email marketers” buy service from mainstream ESPs to send their permission-challenged email that they cannot get delivered through their own IP space.
There are different strategies for companies to prevent bad groups from appropriating their  reputation. For the ESP, the prime defense against reputation appropriation is screening new customers and new lists.
When screening potential customers, there are three broad categories that customers fall into. One is the legit prospect that is exactly whom they represent to you, these are the easy guys. Another is the naive mailer, who really does not have any clue about email but wants to move into the digital age. This mailer is often extremely small, but knows nothing about email. The final category is the subversive prospect. This is the company who knows exactly what they are doing, and who is actively working to hide their practices from the ESP. They are attempting to subvert the process.
Over the coming weeks I will be talking more about screening new customers and how to distinguish the naive customer from the subversive one.

Read More

The Question

Mark Brownlow has a list of 12 questions every email marketer should ask about their marketing program. Buried in the middle is the most important question for delivery.

Read More