I’ve been working with a new client on getting them signed up for FBLs, whitelists and other sorts of monitoring. One of the places I recommended to them was signing up for the Hotmail Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) program. It’s been a while since I’ve gone through the process, so I decided to sign up our network space to give up to date instructions from to clients.
As part of the process, Microsoft confirms the request with the network owner. This is smart, it prevents the wrong people from getting access to delivery data. They use public records (ARIN and IP Whois data) to figure out the “network owner” and send an email to that person. In my case, the mail was sent to a role account at Hurricane Electric (he.net).
I asked for access, filling in “this is Laura from Word to the Wise and I am looking for access to our space.” The email address in the request was my @hotmail.com address. A few minutes later I checked my inbox to find an email from he.net.
Hello Laura,
Did you request access to SNDS data for the 184.105.179.128/25 subnet?
If so, go ahead and click the link to authorize yourself.
If it was an impostor, then click the other link to deny access and let
me know so that we can watch out for more of the same.
[snip lots of information including the link]
We have generally been happy as a customer of he.net, but was impressed they have systems in place for handling SNDS requests. I know this was a boilerplate email, but it was a well done boiler plate. It had the information I needed to confirm the request, let me know what to do if there was abuse, and was sent out within an hour of the signup.
Low volume, highly personalized transactional email is something we don’t often talk about as senders. But this type of email is very important.
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