What makes a good ESP?

There are a number of things that make a responsible ESP, including setting and enforcing standards higher than those set by the ISPs.
One of the responsible ESPs is Mailchimp. (Full disclaimer, I do consult for Mailchimp.) This ESP focuses on businesses with small to medium sized lists. They screen new customers for source of permission as well as mail content.
As well as putting a human in the loop and identifying problem customers manually, they have also developed an automated process that predicts the likelihood that a certain customer will violate their standards. This process is very similar to the reputation process in place at many ISPs. Customers that are flagged as potential problems are reviewed by staff members who contact the customer for further clarification.
What’s the benefit of this process? A good reputation, a clean customer base and positive notice by the ISPs. In fact,  just recently I was contacted by one of the very large consumer ISPs, confirming that Mailchimp is one of my clients. He informed me that he’d noticed a few of the Mailchimp IPs had a really high reputation but weren’t whitelisted. He asked me to send him all of their IPs so he could make sure all their IPs were whitelisted.
Proactive auditing of customers and predictive modeling of mailing results is working for Mailchimp and their customers.
Some ESPs have aggressive cancellation policies, which helps them police their networks and their customers. I often encounter former customers of these ESPs, either as direct clients or as customers of my ESP clients. In one case, I was asking around about a new client at their old ESP. “They tell me they left you under their own power and there was no spam issue involved, can you comment?” The policy person would not comment specifically about that client, but did comment that “95% of our former customers were disconnected for cause.”
These are two examples of ESPs that are working hard to minimize the amount of unwanted mail going through their network. They have invested time and energy into tools and staff to monitor the network. Staff is empowered to make decisions about customers and management believes no customer is “to big to disconnect.”
Tomorrow we’ll look at typical ESPs and their normal practices.

Related Posts

Blocking of ESPs

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on my post about upcoming changes that ESPs will be facing in the future. One thing some people read into the post is the idea that ISPs will be blocking ESPs wholesale without any regard for the quality of the mail from that company.
The idea that ESPs are at risk for blocking simply because they are ESPs has been floating around the industry based on comments by an employee at a spam filter vendor at a recent industry conference.
I talked to the company to get some clarification on what that spam filtering company is doing and hopefully to calm some of the concerns that people have.
First off, and probably most important, is that the spam filtering company in question primarily targets their service to enterprises. Filtering is an important part of this service, but it also handles email archiving, URL filtering and employee monitoring. The target market for the company is very different than the ISP market.
The ISPs are not talking about blocking indiscriminately, they are talking about blocking based on bad behavior.
Secondly, this option was driven by customer request. The customers of the spam filtering appliance were complaining about “legitimate” mail from various ESPs. Despite being reasonable targeted the mail was unrequested by the recipient. While ESPs use FBLs and other sources of complaints to clean complainers off rented or epended lists at ISPs, the option is not available for mail sent to corporations. Enterprises don’t, nor should they have to, create and support FBLs. Nor should employees be expected to unsubscribe from mail they never requested.
This option is the direct result of ESPs allowing customers to send spam.
Thirdly, this option is offered to those customers who ask for it. It is not done automatically for everyone. The option is also configurable down to the end user.
While I haven’t seen the options, nor which ESPs are affected, I expect that the ones on the list are the ones that the filtering vendor receives complaints about. If you are not allowing your customers to send spam, and are stopping them from buying lists or epending, then you probably have not come to the attention of the filtering company and are not on the list of ESPs to block.

Read More

Time to step up

Neil Schwartzman reacts to yesterday’s link post.

Read More

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.

Read More