M3AAWG Boston

The tri-annual procession of Facebook friends and colleagues to a disclosed location to talk about messaging, abuse and prevention started over the weekend.  For me, this M³AAWG conference marks the beginning of a new chapter. We’re hiring, and even before the conference officially started I’ve had some productive conversations with people about what we’re looking for and how we see the company growing. M³AAWG is always a little like a reunion. I’ve been working with some of the people present for more than a dozen years, and some I’ve known for even longer. The conference is work, they mean the “working group” part of their name, but it’s also a time to create and maintain the community that keeps our online messaging from being overwhelmed. If you’re here, drop by and say hi (and don’t forget to visit my session on Thursday afternoon)! Otherwise, watch this space as I share what insights I can about the information presented.

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Still catching up

I had planned to get some more information out from M3AAWG sessions last week, including the Gmail session and the ISP session. But, I am still catching up with other work.
I will say this, though, implementing a preference center will not solve delivery problems when you are sending from an IP with no reverseDNS.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will have content. (Stop laughing. Really. Just stop)

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Questioning standards

M3AAWG publishes documents summarizing and discussing current practices for stopping and preventing abuse. Some of these documents are focused on ISPs while others are focused on marketers. While M3AAWG is not directly nor officially a standards body, most of the documents have been written by members and reflect the best current practices for that document.
Members have been asked to leave the organization and some companies are denied membership because they are not in line with the organizational values. Some of these companies are ESPs or marketers, but some of these companies have been ISPs as well.
The standards written by M3AAWG are challenging for a lot of marketers to follow. These standards are written with the input of senders, but they all comply with the M3AAWG mission of stopping messaging abuse. Many ISPs believe that unsolicited email is abuse, thus M3AAWG standards say that all mail needs to be sent to recipients who request that mail. Purchasing lists, selling lists, and appending email addresses are all unacceptable activities for M3AAWG members.
I never really had much concern about the effectiveness of the M3AAWG process. Most of the big industry players are there and many of the ISPs have an aggressive anti-abuse attitude.
But last week I saw a blog post on a fairly major industry blog that listed a bunch of (made up, tasteless and sexist) things “overheard” at the recent M3AAWG conference (it’s been removed and I wouldn’t link to it anyway). The blog post made it look like no real work gets done at M3AAWG and that the attendees don’t work at the conference. I won’t claim that it’s a staid and quiet conference, but most attendees work very hard during the day.
The next day, the author tweeted:

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Dealing with compromised user accounts

M3AAWG is on a roll lately with published documents. They recently released the Compromised User ID Best Practices (pdf link).

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