And the ugly…

Getting back to my series on the good, the typical and the ugly in the ESP field, and there is some very ugly out there. I have 3 examples of the ugliness out there and what ESPs and legitimate senders are competing with.
The fake ESP
A spammer approached me early on in my consulting career, asking me to help him set up a fake ESP. He wanted to set up his corporate network so that to an outsider it would look like he was selling ESP services and thus had a large number of customers. There wouldn’t be any customers, however, all the mail would be coming from his company. When the blocking got bad enough, and it would as he would purchase addresses from anywhere, he would “disconnect” the responsible customer. My role was to help him come up with a plausible sounding acceptable use policy and then contact the ISPs when he “disconnected” the customer. I declined to participate in this scheme. This doesn’t appear to have stopped him, though, if the rumors I hear are to be believed.
Waterfalling
Related to the fake ESP scheme is waterfalling. Spammers acquire lists of email addresses and then begin the process of cleaning them by mailing. In some cases, they mail through fake ESPs, as above. In other cases, they actually spread their traffic out across legitimate ISPs. As they mail the lists through the ESPs, they remove unsubscribes, bounces and complaints. When the list reaches a set cleanliness, they move it to another ESP. They repeat this, gradually moving through cleaner and cleaner ESPs. Eventually, they move the list to their own network and sell mailings to it as an opt-in list. It’s not opt-in, it’s just cleansed of all negative responders.
The companies abusing ESPs to clean their lists do tarnish the reputation of ESPs. While the responsible ESPs do disconnect the waterfallers, they usually do so after problems are detected. That being said, there are some companies that are constantly looking for “partnerships” at ESPs and the ESPs turn them away during the sales cycles.
Affiliates
While not necessarily an ESP problem there are some large companies out there that hire spammers to send acquisition email for them. They also send their own mail, both marketing and transactional, through ESPs. The issue for ESPs come when the URL blocks happen and the bad reputation of their customer’s mail bleeds back to the ESPs IP addresses. The ESP becomes known as “one of those places that mails for X” and their reputation falls accordingly. In some cases, even if the mail through the ESP is clean and opt-in, the ESP finds itself blocklisted for just doing business with a company that hires spammers.
I’ve had a couple clients recommended to me by ESPs because the ESP was dealing with a persistent spam block around this particular customer. The mail the customer sent through the ESP was opt-in, but the client was using an extensive network of affiliates to send spam for them. I collected a lot of examples of their spam from various affiliates, even gave them a couple of examples from my own email addresses. One of those addresses has not been actively used in 6 years. My client tells me they talked to their affiliates and that the affiliate assured them I had signed up, I just forgot. The client chose to believe the affiliate over me, despite the fact that I had many other examples. That client lost their ESP (and good for the ESP) but is still sending spam. I just got one advertising their stuff yesterday, at the same address I gave to them years ago, all images, hashbusters, domain hidden behind proxy, coming from a snowshoer network.
All of the companies I’ve talked about here describe themselves as legitimate email marketers. Even the company telling me I opted in to their mail was defending themselves and their affiliates as legitimate email marketers.

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Fake privacy policies

I sign up at a lot of websites and liberally spray email addresses across the net. These signups are on behalf of one customer or another and each webform gets its own tagged and tracked email address. I always have a specific goal with each signup: getting a copy of a customer’s email, checking their signup process, auditing an affiliate on behalf of a customer or identifying where there might be a problem in a process. Because I have specific goals, I am pretty careful with these signups and usually uncheck every “share my email address” box I can find on the forms.
In every case the privacy policies of my clients and the things they tell me are explicit in that addresses will not be shared. It’s all opt-in, and email addresses are not shared without permission. Even in the cases where I am auditing affiliates, my clients assure me that if I follow this exact process my address will not be shared. Or so the affiliates have assured them.
Despite my care and the privacy policies on the websites, these addresses occasionally leak or are sold. This is actually very rare, and most of the websites I test never do anything with my address that I don’t expect. But in a couple cases these email addresses have ended up in the hands of some hard core spammers (hundreds of emails a day) and there was no useful tracking I could do. In other cases the volume has been lower, and I’ve watched the progression of my email addresses being bought and sold with morbid fascination.
Today an address I signed up at a website about a year ago got hit with multiple spams in a short time frame. All came from different IPs in the same /24. All had different domains with no websites. Whois showed all the domains were registered behind a privacy protection service. Interestingly, two of the domains used the same CAN SPAM address. The third had no CAN SPAM address at all. None of these addresses match the data I have on file related to the email signup.
It never ceases to amaze me how dishonest some address collection outfits. Their websites state clearly that addresses will not be bought an sold, and yet the addresses get lots of spam unrelated to the original signup. For those dishonest enough to do this they’ll never get caught unless recipients tags and tracks all their signups. Even worse, unless their partners test their signups or their mailing practices, the partners may end up unwittingly sending spam.

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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.

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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.

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