Politics and Delivery

Last week I posted some deliverability advice for the DNC based on their acquisition of President Obama’s 2012 campaign database. Paul asked a question on that post that I think is worth some attention.

I am fascinated by the ramifications of email deliverability for political donations.
Are there sysadmins at the big ISPs who make human decisions on deliverability issues anymore? The power they have to make one candidate’s mail get delivered over another candidate’s mail is enormous. Paul Rydell

There are a lot of issues inside his questions, all of which deserve some discussion.
The first is who makes deliverability decisions inside ISPs. My experience is that it isn’t really sysadmins who do that. Even in the early days (late 90s) most of the delivery decisions were made by someone other than the sysadmins, at least at the big consumer ISPs. In the early 2000s most blocking decisions were handled by humans, making decisions based on data from their internal tools. As the tools became better, the decisions were handled automatically. By the mid to late 2000s, many systems were handling blocks and bans without a human having to review and allow them.
I don’t believe at most of the consumer ISPs and webmail providers that there is any single person with the authority to block mail. There are multiple people who are permitted to block mail that meets the criteria for blocking. But, those criteria are based on performance, not based on message. I’ve written about this many times before. (The Perils of Politics, Censorship, Email and Politics, They’re not blocking you because they hate you, It really can be your email, More on Truthout, Another perspective on the politico article).
There’s also an implication that one person “a sysadmin” shouldn’t have the ability to make decisions about what traffic is OK and what traffic isn’t. Except that’s exactly how it is. Sysadmins have a lot of access to our private data. Some of them can even read our email. Many sysadmins, particularly those who herd large numbers of machines, are very careful about respecting recipient needs, wants and privacy. I was once working with a friend who was a sysadmin at supernews to try and troubleshoot some USENET problems I was having. He made very sure to get direct permission from me to actually look at my account and log information.
Do I think every sysadmin is a bastion of integrity? Of course not. No group of people is perfect all the time. But I do think those individuals who have the power to block messages “follow the rules” when making blocking decisions. Those rules are written by the ISP management team, and people who block traffic have to answer to their manager (and manager’s manager) when they violate the internal processes and block things for reasons that are not behavior based. Everyone who has the power to block mail has a management chain that enforces behavior based blocking.
Then there’s the complexity of what a sysadmin is and what their job is. I asked Mary, who was a sysadmin at a giant consumer ISP in the late 90s, to talk about her experiences as a sysadmin and blocking issues.
Finally, there’s an implication that ISPs have a responsibility to accept and deliver every piece of email sent to them. It’s been established case law, for almost 20 years now, that ISPs do not have to accept and deliver every piece of mail (Cyberpromo v. AOL). If recipients are complaining about mail, there is no obligation for the ISP to deliver it.
Now, Paul and I have had these discussions before. We’ve worked together to address deliverability challenges for political mailers. Some of that work inspired some of my earlier posts on political mail and blocking. A lot of people really believe that email is a public channel, after all most of the public can use it. But it’s not a public channel. Most of the internet, in fact, is privately owned. The owners have a lot of authority to only allow certain traffic on their networks, and blocking email is in that realm of authority.

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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.

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AHBL Wildcards the Internet

AHBL (Abusive Host Blocking List) is a DNSBL (Domain Name Service Blacklist) that has been available since 2003 and is used by administrators to crowd-source spam sources, open proxies, and open relays.  By collecting the data into a single list, an email system can check this blacklist to determine if a message should be accepted or rejected. AHBL is managed by The Summit Open Source Development Group and they have decided after 11 years they no longer wish to maintain the blacklist.
A DNSBL works like this, a mail server checks the sender’s IP address of every inbound email against a blacklist and the blacklist responses with either, yes that IP address is on the blacklist or no I did not find that IP address on the list.  If an IP address is found on the list, the email administrator, based on the policies setup on their server, can take a number of actions such as rejecting the message, quarantining the message, or increasing the spam score of the email.
The administrators of AHBL have chosen to list the world as their shutdown strategy. The DNSBL now answers ‘yes’ to every query. The theory behind this strategy is that users of the list will discover that their mail is all being blocked and stop querying the list causing this. In principle, this should work. But in practice it really does not because many people querying lists are not doing it as part of a pass/fail delivery system. Many lists are queried as part of a scoring system.
Maintaining a DNSBL is a lot of work and after years of providing a valuable service, you are thanked with the difficulties with decommissioning the list.  Popular DNSBLs like the AHBL list are used by thousands of administrators and it is a tough task to get them to all stop using the list.  RFC6471 has a number of recommendations such as increasing the delay in how long it takes to respond to a query but this does not stop people from using the list.  You could change the page responding to the site to advise people the list is no longer valid, but unlike when you surf the web and come across a 404 page, a computer does not mind checking the same 404 page over and over.
Many mailservers, particularly those only serving a small number of users, are running spam filters in fire-and-forget mode, unmaintained, unmonitored, and seldom upgraded until the hardware they are running on dies and is replaced. Unless they do proper liveness detection on the blacklists they are using (and they basically never do) they will keep querying a list forever, unless it breaks something so spectacularly that the admin notices it.
So spread the word,

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Ever changing filtering

One of the ongoing challenges sending email, and managing a high volume outbound mail server is dealing with the ongoing changes in filtering. Filters are not static, nor can they be. As ISPs and filtering companies identify new ways to separate out wanted email from unwanted email, spammers find new ways to make their mail look more like wanted mail.
This is one reason traps are useful to filtering companies. With traps there is no discussion about whether or not the mail was requested. No one with any connection to the email address opted in to receive mail. The mail was never requested. While it is possible for trap addresses to get on any list monitoring mail to spam traps is a way to monitor which senders don’t have good practices.
New filtering techniques are always evolving. I mentioned yesterday that Gmail was making filtering changes, and that this was causing a lot of delivery issues for senders. The other major challenge for Gmail is the personalized delivery they are doing. It’s harder and harder for senders to monitor their inbox delivery because almost every inbox is different at Gmail. I’ve seen different delivery in some of my own mailboxes at Gmail.
All of this makes email delivery an ongoing challenge.

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