Abuse it and lose it

Last week I blogged about the changes at ISPs that make “ISP Relations” harder for many senders. But it’s not just ISPs that are making it a little more difficult to get answers to questions, some spam filtering companies are pulling back on offering support to senders.
For instance, Cloudmark sent out an email to some ESPs late last week informing them that Cloudmark was changing their sender support policies. It’s not that they’re overwhelmed with delisting requests, but rather that many ESPs are asking for specific data about why the mail was blocked. In December, Spamcop informed some ESPs that they would stop providing data to those ESPs about specific blocks and spam trap hits.
These decisions make it harder for ESPs to identify specific customers and lists causing them to get blocked. But I understand why the filtering companies have had to take such a radical step.
Support for senders by filtering companies is a side issue. Their customers are the users of the filtering service and support teams are there to help paying customers. Many of the folks at the filtering companies are good people, though, and they’re willing to help blocked senders and ESPs to figure out the problem.
For them, providing information that helps a company clean up is a win. If an ESP has a spamming customer and the information from the filtering company is helping the ESP force the customer to stop spamming that’s a win and that’s why the filtering companies started providing that data to ESPs.
Unfortunately, there are people who take advantage of the filtering companies. I have dozens of stories about how people are taking advantage of the filtering companies. I won’t share specifics, but the summary is that some people and ESPs ask for the same data over and over and over again. The filtering company rep, in an effort to be helpful and improve the overall email ecosystem, answers their questions and sends the data. In some cases, the ESP acts on the data, the mail stream improves and everyone is happy (except maybe the spammer). In other cases, though, the filtering company sees no change in the mail stream. All the filtering company person gets is yet another request for the same data they sent yesterday.
Repetition is tedious. Repetition is frustrating. Repetition is disheartening. Repetition is annoying.
What we’re seeing from both Spamcop and Cloudmark is the logical result from their reps being tired of dealing with ESPs that aren’t visibly fixing their customer spam problems. Both companies are sending some ESPs to the back of the line when it comes to handling information requests, whether or not those ESPs have actually been part of the problem previously.
The Cloudmark letter makes it clear what they’re frustrated about.

Over the past few months, Cloudmark has seen a significant increase in the number of queries from ESPs requesting information on campaigns that have been content-blocked based on Cloudmark data. This increase has required us to review how the Cloudmark support team can handle such requests without affecting the service that we provide to Cloudmark customers.
In all cases, our response to ESPs is that their clients need to clean up their mailing lists and practice better list hygiene on an ongoing basis. We would like to see an improvement from those clients whose names continue to appear in support tickets to Cloudmark.
Our review has shown that the requests for information are not for us to unblock the content but usually to get details on what caused the content to be marked as spam, including requesting ratios of blocks to unblocks. However, all ESPs have access to most of this information already by signing up to feedback loops and having seed accounts at large ISPs.

I’ve heard much the same thing from Spamcop reps. Paraphrased: if people don’t want to be blocked, they need to clean up their mail and stop spamming.
Dealing with spam filtering blocks is much like dealing with ISP blocks. Senders cannot rely on the blocking entity to give details and information about the whys of blocking. Instead, the ESPs and senders must use available information to determine the underlying cause of delivery problems.
This is actually a large change. It used to be almost any one who knew people who worked in the email space could act as a “delivery expert” because they knew the right people to ask. More and more, though, ISP and spam filter relations are no longer about who you know, they’re about what you understand about the ecosystem and what you can extrapolate from available data.

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Turn it all the way up to 11

I made that joke the other night and most of the folks who heard it didn’t get the reference. It made me feel just a little bit old.
Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week.
I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where marketers and the folks that run the ISP spam filters end up in the same room. I don’t think the marketers always understand what is happening inside the postmaster and filtering desks on a day to day basis at the ISPs. Legitimate marketing? It’s a small fraction of the mail they deal with. Ken claims that marketing pays the salaries of these employees and they’d be out of a job if marketing didn’t exist. Possibly, but only in the context that they are paid to keep their employers servers up and running so that the giant promises made by the marketing team of faster downloads and better online experiences actually happen.
If there wasn’t an internet and there weren’t servers to maintain, they’d have good jobs elsewhere. They’d be building trains or designing buildings or any of the thousands of other jobs that require smart technical people.
Ken has no idea what these folks running the filters and keeping your email alive deal with on a regular basis. They deal with the utter dregs and horrors of society. They are the people dealing with unrelenting spam and virus and phishing attacks bad enough to threaten to take down their networks and the networks of everyone else. They also end up dealing with law enforcement to deal with criminals. Some of what they do is deal with is unspeakable, abuse and mistreatment of children and animals. These are the folks who stand in front of the rest of us, and make the world better for all of us.
They should be thanked for doing their job, not chastised because they’re doing what the people who pay them expect them to be doing.
Yes, recipients want the mail they want. But, y’know, I bet they really don’t want all the bad stuff that the ISPs protect against. Ken took offense at a statement that he really shouldn’t have. ISPs do check their false positive rates on filtering, and those rates are generally less than 1% of all the email that they filter. Marketers should be glad they’re such a small part of the problem. They really don’t want to be a bigger part.

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Filtering is not just about spam

A lot of filters started out just as filters against spam. But over the years they’ve morphed into more general blocks against dangerous or problematic email. There’s a lot of crime and bad behavior on the internet, much of it using email as a conduit or vector. Filtering is so much more than stopping spam now. It’s as much, or more, about stopping crime.
Email filters are essential to protect us from scammers. Sometimes I forget this, and then I read about a grandmother getting swindled by a Nigerian scammer and ending up dead.
There are real consequences to poor filtering and there is real crime facilitated by email. It’s easy to forget this as we deal with the email that gets caught in filters when they shouldn’t.
Filters are one of the first lines of defense against online crime.
Not only does filtering stop crime, but they also keep email working. An unfiltered mail stream is an ugly, unreadable, unworkable mess.

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Email filters

What makes the best email filter? There isn’t really a single answer to that question. Different people and different organizations have different tolerances for how false positives versus false negatives. For instance, we’re quite sensitive to false positives here, so we run extremely conservative filtering and don’t block very much at the MTA level. Other people I know are very sensitive to false negatives and run more aggressive filtering and block quite a bit of mail at the MTA level.
For the major ISPs, the people who plan, approve, design and monitor the filters usually want to maximize customer happiness. They want to deliver as much real mail as possible while blocking as much bad mail. Blocking real mail and letting through bad mail both result in unhappy customers and increase the ISP’s costs, either through customer churn or through support calls. And this is a process, filters are not static. ISPs roll out new filters all the time, sometimes they are an improvement and sometimes they’re not. When they’re not, they’re pulled out of production. This works both for positive filters like Return Path and negative filters like blocklists.
Then there is mail filtering that doesn’t have to do with spam. Business filters, for instance, often block non-business mail. Permission of the recipient often isn’t even a factor. Companies don’t often go out of their way to block personal mail, but if personal mail gets blocked (say the vacation plane ticket or the amazon receipt) they don’t often unblock it. But when you think about why a business provides email, it makes perfect sense. The business provides email to further its own business goals. Some personal usage is usually OK, but if someone notices and blocks personal email then it’s unlikely the business will unblock it, even if the employee opted in.
In the case of email filters, the free market does work. Different ISPs filter mail differently. Some people love Gmail’s filters. Other people think Hotmail has the best filtering. There are different standards for filtering, and that makes email stronger and more robust. Consumers have choices in their mail provider and spamfiltering.

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