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

Senders need to take responsibility

Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet.
If the ISPs would just tell us what they want us to do, we’ll do it.

The ISPs have told senders what they want them to do. They want senders to stop sending mail that their users don’t want. It is a very simple statement.
Stop sending spam.

For many senders, however, it’s not enough. “Tell us exactly what we need to do to stop sending spam. What complaint rates must we be under? What bounce rates do we have to be under? How do you want us to do this?” By this point in the conversation the ISP person is mentally rolling their eyes and looking for a way to escape the conversation.
The ISPs don’t want to tell senders how to behave, they want senders to start behaving. Stop sending spam should be all they need to tell senders.
Senders who ask for ISPs to tell them how to stop sending mail recipients think is spam are looking for specific thresholds they can stay under. They’re not really interested in actually sending wanted mail, they’re interested in sending good-enough mail, where good-enough mail is simply mail that gets to the inbox.
Want to know why ISPs don’t think much of many senders? Because the senders are not visibly taking any stand against abuse. I know there are a lot of senders out there who stop a lot of spam from ever leaving their systems, but there’s also a lot of unwanted mail that goes out, too. Some of that mail is even spam by any definition of the word. All the ISPs can see is the spam that gets through, and then they hear just tell us what to do and we’ll do it. From an ISP perspective, this means the senders only care about the thresholds and getting in under the ISPs’ radars.
Senders need to take more responsibility for the mail that goes out over their networks.
What do I mean by this? I mean senders need to stop waiting for the ISPs to define good practices. Senders need to implement standards and good practices just because they’re good practices, not because the ISPs are dictating the practices. Senders need to stop customers from doing bad things, and dump them if they won’t stop. Senders need to stop relying on ISPs for specific answers to why mail is being blocked. Senders need to take responsibility for the mail going across their networks.
It’s time for senders to grow up and stop relying on others for guidance. They shouldn’t implement good practices just because the ISPs tell them to, but instead should implement good practices because they are good practices.

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Legitimate email marketers need to take a stand

I was reading an article on Virus Rants and the opening paragraph really stood out.

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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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