Comments on Holomaxx post

I’m putting together a longer analysis of the Holomaxx case that will look at the claims against the various defendants. There’s some deep mis-understanding of how various things works (hint: wiretapping? not so much).
There was one comment from “The Other Barry” about complaints that I think bears highlighting.

Silly people.  High complaints means filters need to be more aggressive.   “Not Spam” reports means the filters need to be less aggressive.  Low complaints means the filters are accurate.

The Other Barry is someone who has real world experience managing filtering for a large ISP.
In other comments, Steve White is excited to see ISP filtering come under judicial scrutiny. I’m not sure why, there is plenty of case law around filters already. There’s even US law stating ISPs can filter. But, hey, I’m sure some lawsuit from a company no one has ever heard of before will be sufficient to turn over 10 years of precedence.

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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.
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This option is the direct result of ESPs allowing customers to send spam.
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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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