Resource hogging

Today on SFGate there was an article talking about how some Bay Area coffee houses were struggling to deal with workers who purchase one cup of coffee and then camp out all day using the free wifi. The final paragraph quoted one of the campers.

“We usually get one small coffee and stay for hours,” [Camilla Magrane] said. “Internet should be free.”

This type of resource abuse is obvious – customers can’t get tables to drink their coffee or have a quiet conversation with a companion. Less obvious is the type of resource abuse that ISPs have to deal with. Spammers avoid blocks by using botnets or frequently changing IP addresses (snowshoeing). ESPs open up tens or hundreds of connections at any one time. Delivery experts attempt to bypass published support channels and instead send direct messages to ISP employees hoping for a faster resolution to an issue.
All of these things use more than the sender’s share of resources and is very akin to buying a single cup of coffee and hogging up a table for a full day.

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The delivery communication gap

There seems to be a general uptick in the number of specific questions that ESPs and commercial senders are asking recently. I’m getting them from clients, and I’m hearing similar stories from my various contacts over on the ISP side. The questions cover a wide range of areas in email delivery, but the underlying issue is really that there are no real fixed rules about email delivery anymore. The only rule is “send mail users want to receive” and there are no specific guidelines to how to do that.
This is frustrating for a lot of people. They want to know exactly how many complaints they need to stay under. They want to know what “engagement” means and how exactly the ISPs are measuring it. They want to know all of the metrics they need to meet in order to get mail to the inbox.
There is a lot of frustration among senders because they’re not getting the answers they think they need and they feel like the ISPs aren’t listening to them.
Likewise there is a lot of frustration among ISPs because they’re giving answers but they feel like they’re not being heard.
Some of the problem is truly a language difference. A lot of delivery people on the ESP side are marketers first and technologists second. They don’t have operational experience. They don’t have that any feel for the technology behind email and can’t map different failure modes onto their causes. Some of them don’t have any idea how email works under the covers. Likewise, a lot of postmaster people are technologists. They deeply understand their customers and their email servers and don’t speak marketing.
The other issue is the necessary secrecy. Postmasters have been burned in the past and so they have to be vague about what variables they are measuring and how they are weighting them.
All of this leads to a very adversarial environment.
I’ve been talking with a lot of people about this and none of us have any real answers to the solution. Senders say the ISPs should spend more time explaining to the senders what they need to do. ISPs say the senders should stop sending spam.
Am I quite off base here? Is there no communication gap? Am I just cynical and missing some obvious solution? Anyone have any suggestions on how to solve the issue?

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Time to step up

Neil Schwartzman reacts to yesterday’s link post.

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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.

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