Lessons from the good, the typical and the ugly

What can smart ESPs learn from my recent series The good, The typical and The ugly?

  1. Not every company that labels themselves legitimate email marketers actually implements good practices. Every example of an ugly ESP calls themselves legitimate marketers. In fact a fair number of spammers, those using botnets and breaking the law also describe themselves as legitimate email marketers. Al Ralsky, Chris Rizler, and Robert Soloway all presented themselves as legitimate. Legitimate email marketing is not something to claim, it’s something to do.
  2. Even typical ESPs do things that are not always good practices. These practices include allowing customers to spam, helping customers evade blocks and overtaxing ISP support desks.
  3. Good ESPs are outnumbered by typical ESPs and typical ESPs are outnumbered by ugly ESPs. The volume of mail sent by the good is vastly smaller than the volume of mail sent by anyone else. As I quipped a few days ago: 95% of email marketing gives the rest a bad name.

The typical and the ugly are going to see inbox placement become more of a challenge. Good delivery will become more and more reliant on sending mail recipients actually want, not just mail they don’t object to.

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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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The coming changes

Yesterday I talked about how I’m hearing warnings of a coming paradigm shift in the email industry. While these changes will affect all sender, ESPs in particular are going to need to change how they interact with both ISPs and their customers.
Currently, ESPs are able to act as “routine conveyers.” The traffic going across their network is generated by their customers and the ESP only handles technical issues. Responsible ESPs do enforce standards on their customers and expect mailings to meet certain targets. They monitor complaints and unknown users, they monitor blocks and reputation. If customers get out of line, then the ESP steps in and forces their customer to improve their practices. If the customer refuses, then the ESP disconnects them.
Currently standards for email are mostly dictated by the ISPs. Many ESPs take the stance that if any mail that is not blocked by the ISPs then it is acceptable. But just because a certain customer isn’t blocked doesn’t mean they’re sending mail that is wanted by the recipients.
It seems this reactive approach to customer policing may no longer be enough. In fact, one of the large spam filter providers has recently offered their customers the ability to block mail from all ESPs with a single click. This may become a more common response if the ESPs don’t start proactively policing their networks.
Why is this happening? ISPs and filtering companies are seeing increasing percentages of spam coming out of ESP netspace. Current processes for policing customers are extremely reactive and there are many ESPs that are allowing their customers to send measurable percentages of spam. This situation is untenable for the filtering companies or the ISPs and they’re sending out warnings that the ESPs need to stop letting so much spam leave their networks.
Unsurprisingly, there are many members of the ESP community that don’t like this and think the ISPs are overreacting and being overly mean. They do not think the ISPs or filtering companies should be blocking all an ESPs customers just because some of the customers are sending unwanted mail. Paraphrased, some of the things I’ve heard include:

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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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