A series of warnings

Over the last month there have been a number of people sounding warnings about coming changes that ESPs are going to have to deal with. There has been mixed reaction from various people, many people who hear these predictions start arguing with the speaker. Some argue that our predictions are wrong, others argue that if our predictions are right then the senders will just start acting more like spammers.
I have put together a collection of links from recent blog posts looking towards the future and how things may be changing.

Permission: Posted by Jamie Tomasello on the Cloudmark blog.

[ESPs] need to require permission practices of your clients, or you need to reconsider your relationship with these clients. Is what the client is paying you enough to cover the cost of resolving deliverability issues and the damage to the reputation of your IP addresses and the reputation of your company?

Did you catch that: Posted by Al Iverson on the Spamresource blog.

This all ties in to my recent thoughts on the whole concept of email service providers and marketers repeatedly asking for ISPs to tell them what the rules are. I run into people who say stuff like this all the time: “We just need the ISPs to tell us what the rules are, and we’ll stick to them.” Except, ISPs have been telling you what the rules are for years now. Stop feigning deafness. I wish I had a dollar for every time an IP address got blocked at (big ISP) and somebody asked me, “can’t we just assign another IP address?” instead of showing any desire toward fixing the problem that caused the block.

Permission vs. Request: Posted by Christine Borgia on the AOL Postmaster blog

Permission isn’t enough. Our best practices document says “Ensure that you are only sending mail to users who specifically requested it.” Look at your opt-in process. Are people really requesting your mail? If not, I’d bet you aren’t seeing the inbox delivery you’d like to see.

Spammer is as spammer does: Posted by Mickey Chandler on Spamtacular.com

If those of us who work for ESPs start acting like spammers do, then don’t we become what we claim to hate?

Lead, Follow or get our of the way: Another post by Jamie at Cloudmark

It is time for ESPs and senders to [address problem mail]. ESPs, if you are serious about reducing abusive messages being sent through you as well as preventing your company (reputation, account managers, deliverability folks, etc) and industry from being abused, then I am willing to help and provide as much input and insight as I can. However, if it is just lip-service, I cannot help you unless you are willing to help yourselves.

Why is my window fogged up?: from Annalivia Ford, Senior Account Manager at AOL

My frustration lies in the fact that I can’t helpfully answer those questions any more, because of the ESPs and hosting companies that don’t do a really good job. This trend is not exactly a secret. […] [senders] do the least amount they could get away with to still comply with the existing standards… and no more than that. Sometimes, they’d go to great lengths to attempt to game the systems. Naturally, this behavior was noticed, adjustments were made to counter-act these tricks, and transparency decreased to virtual opacity over time, thus ruining it for the good guys.

Barry Speaks: We won’t shut-up and eat your spam: A guest post by a ISP rep on the Spamtacular blog.

What the we are trying to do is keep our own customers happy by delivering less spam and more wanted mail, and to keep our mail systems from falling over under the load. […] Clean up your mailing lists and your networks, senders, and you will find that your problems disappear without having to explain your business model for the 473895966578675560909th time to people who have already heard it 473895966578675560908 times.

ISPs are speaking is anyone listening? from: Word to the Wise

No longer are there hard metrics driving delivery decisions. ISPs are moving from complaint based filtering schemes to something a lot more squishy. The ISPs want mail that their recipients want. They don’t want mail their recipients don’t want.

The coming changes from: Word to the Wise

The ISP […] are seeing spam coming from an ESP and they expect the ESP to make it stop. This is it, ESPs, you’ve now been accepted as full members of the email ecosystem and are now expected to police the traffic coming off your IP space. It is no longer sufficient to segregate customers onto their own IPs and let the ISPs block unwanted mail. ESPs are now expected to do their own policing and their own monitoring.

Legitimate Email Marketers need to take a stand from: Word to the Wise

Being a legitimate email marketer means taking sides and taking the side aligned with the general public’s interest. It does not mean that you get a free pass against blocking and filtering at ISPs, it means that you adhere to a higher standard. It means doing the right things, rejecting the bad things and standing up against those who adopt poor practices.

Related Posts

Tribes

Earlier Laura talked about a communication gap between ESPs and ISPs.
My take on it is that it’s something more than just a difficulty in communicating, rather it’s a division due to differences in personality and approach of those individuals whose primary interest is themselves and those whose primary interest is the health of the overall email ecosystem.
The former group (who I mentally refer to using the shorthand “frat boys“) want to make everything all about them, and their companies revenue, and their visibility in the industry, and their ego resume. Broad generalizations with little need for understanding are adequate to raise their visibility and keep them employed. Details aren’t that important to them. Dominating the conversation is. (Lest that sound negative, these are exactly the individuals who can thrive in sales, customer relations, bizdev and marketing environments.)
The latter (shorthand “utilitarians“) instinctively want to make email work well and to be useful for everyone. They want email to be a healthy, useful system and tend to believe that that means optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number. (If you’ve any philosophy background, think “felicific calculus as applied to email”). They tend to understand the system in much more detail than the frat boys, though maybe less than the mechanics. And they tend to be better at working together – as they’re more interested in hearing other peoples data in order to get better at what they do, rather than being there to convince others of their pre-decided agenda.
(There’s a third group I think of as “mechanics” who take more joy in the details of keeping the system running smoothly on a small scale, without much interest in the broader system, whether that be in a technical or business role. They tend not to be very interactive in public, though, so don’t have much impact at the level of conversations I’m thinking about).
While I hate the broad terms “senders” and “receivers” used to (falsely) divide the industry into two disjoint halves, I’m painting with a fairly broad brush here, so I’m going to stick with them.
There are quite a few of all three types of people at both senders and receivers – but their power and visibility varies.
At senders there’s a mix of frat boys and utilitarians in operational and policy making positions, but the frat boys tend to have a lot more public visibility – they’re the ones who are trying to be visible, to dominate the conversation, and they’re the people you tend to see doing all the talking and less of the listening, whether it be on industry mailing lists or at the microphone at a conference. Because of their greater visibility, they’re who you think of when you think of senders, and typically they’ll be the ones you end up interacting with most in any random mix of individuals from senders.
At receivers the  operational (as opposed to policy) level is where the real decision making power is as far as email is concerned, and it’s heavily dominated by the utilitarians. (In fact, the more visible frat boys I can think of who were in influential positions at receivers are mostly now working on behalf of senders).
Frat boys are very, very bad at communicating with utilitarians. And utilitarians find it very hard to discuss issues they consider serious with frat boys at anything deeper than a superficial level.
Mechanics aren’t great at communicating with strangers in anything other than a fairly friendly environment, but manage best with other mechanics or with utilitarians.
If you’re a C level manager at a sender, and you’re deciding which of your staff are well suited to collaborate with typical receiver staff that’s something important to consider. The public face of the recievers are probably utilitarians. Frat boys are the worst representatives to send out to talk to them.

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What she said

Jamie Tomasello on the Cloudmark Blog:

ESPs who require and enforce best permission practices should be applying peer and industry pressure within the ESP community to adopt these policies. Ultimately, ESPs need to take responsibility for their clients’ practices. If you are aware that your clients are engaging in questionable or bad practices, address those issues before contacting an ISP or anti-spam vendor to resolve the issue.

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A blast from the past

I’m sitting here watching Iron Chef (the real one, not the American version) and surfing around on SFGate.com. It’s a slow night catching up on all the news I’ve missed this week while off traveling. I see a link on the front page: “Web marketer ordered to pay Facebook $711M.” As I click I wonder if I know the web marketer in question. A former client? A name I recognize?

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