SBCGlobal having a bad day
I’m seeing scattered reports of the SBCGlobal.net MTAs refusing connections. No current information about fixes.
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ISP Relationships
- laura
- Sep 11, 2013
Delivra has a new whitepaper written by Ken Magill talking about the value (or lack thereof) of relationships with ISPs. In Ken’s understated way, he calls baloney on ESPs that claim they have great delivery because they have good relationships with ISPs.
He’s right.
I get a lot of calls from potential clients and some calls from current clients asking me if I can contact an ISP on their behalf and “tell the ISP we’re really not a spammer”. My normal answer is that I can, but that there isn’t a place in the spam filtering process for “sender has hired Laura and she says they’re not a spammer.” I mean, it would be totally awesome if that was the case. But it’s not. It’s even the case where I’m close friends with folks inside the ISPs.
I’m pretty sure I’ve told the story before about being at a party with one of the Hotmail ISP folks. There was a sender that had hired me to deal with some Hotmail issues and I’d been working with Barry H. (name changed, and he’s not at Hotmail any more) to resolve it. During the course of the party, we started talking shop. Barry told me that he was sure that my client was sending opt-in mail, but that his users were not reacting well for it. He also told me there was no way he could override the filters because there wasn’t really a place for him to interfere in the filtering.
Even when folks inside the ISPs were willing and able to help me, they usually wouldn’t do so just because I asked. They might look at a sender on my request, but they wouldn’t adjust filters unless the sender met their standards.
These days? ISPs are cutting their non-income producing departments to the bone, and “sender services” is high up the list of departments to cut. Most of the folks I know have moved on from the ISP to the ESP side. Ken mentions one ISP rep that is now working for a sender. I actually know of 3, and those are just employees from the top few ISPs who are now at fairly major ESPs. I’m sure there are a lot more than that.
The reality is, you can have the best relationships in the world with ISPs, but that won’t get bad mail into the inbox. Filters don’t work that way anymore. That doesn’t mean relationships are useless, though. Having relationships at ISPs can get information that can shorten the process of fixing the issue. If an ISP says “you are blocked because you’re hitting spam traps” then we do data hygiene. If the ISP says “you’re sending mail linking to a blocked website” then we stop linking to that website.
I have a very minor quibble with one thing Ken said, though. He says “no one has a relationship with Spamhaus volunteer, they’re all anonymous.” This isn’t exactly true. Spamhaus volunteers do reveal themselves. Some of them go around openly at MAAWG with nametags and affiliations. A couple of them are colleagues from my early MAPS days. Other do keep their identities secret, but will reveal them to people they trust to keep those identities secret. Or who they think have already figured it out. There was one drunken evening at MAAWG where the nice gentleman I was joking with leaned over and says “You know I am elided from Spamhaus, right?” Uh. No? I didn’t. I do now!
But even though I have the semi-mythical personal relationship with folks from Spamhaus, it doesn’t mean my clients get preferential treatment. My clients get good advice, because I know what Spamhaus is looking for and can translate their requirements into solid action steps for the client to perform. But I can think of half a dozen ESP delivery folks that have the same sorts of relationships with Spamhaus volunteers.
Overall, relationships are valuable, but they are not sufficient to fix inbox delivery problems.
Happy Sweet 16, Yahoo.
- laura
- Oct 8, 2013
Yahoo mail turns 16 today, and in celebration Yahoo is giving all their mail users presents.
Read MoreYahoo now auctioning domain names
- laura
- Nov 13, 2013
This summer Yahoo shook up the email ecosystem by publicly announcing they were recycling usernames. The shakeup wasn’t so much that they were recycling usernames, but that they did it in a way that compromised user information and account security. Any user that had an account tied to a recycled Yahoo account is at risk for having their PII leaked. Folks are still dealing with the fallout, both Yahoo and the companies who are trying to meet customer needs by sending emails and protect customer emails by not sending emails.
On top of that, Yahoo announced they’re selling off a number of domains that they’ve accumulated over the years. Some of these are pretty high value domains like webserver.com, sandwich.com and other real words.
I don’t think Yahoo used any of these domains for email, and even if they did any addresses should have bounced off years ago. Still, it does bring up some broader policy issues.
Many, many things online, from bank accounts to social media accounts to blog commenting systems treat email addresses as a unique identifier for that account. Many of these databases were developed with the underlying assumption that people wouldn’t change their email addresses and that it was a static value. This wasn’t a true assumption 10 years ago and it’s certainly not true now. This mistaken assumption is a problem, and one that more and more companies are going to have to address moving forward. This isn’t about email and it isn’t about delivery, it’s about simple data accuracy and hygiene.
Companies must start thinking and addressing email address impermanence. These issues are not going away.