Last year a number of ISPs mentioned the Black Friday email volume was congesting their systems and causing delays. While anecdotally it seems that volume is up over last year I also haven’t heard any ISPs talking about congestion. Likewise, most of the delivery folks I’ve spoken too today and over the weekend are saying there were no major problems.
How’d the busiest email weekend of the year work for all of you?
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.
There’s been an explosion of “Google plugins” that facilitate spam through Gmail and G Suite. They have a similar set of features. Most of these features act to protect the spammer from spam filtering and the poor reputation that comes from purchasing lists and incessantly spamming targets. Some of these plugins have all the features of a full fledged ESP, except a SMTP server and a compliance / deliverability team.
I’ll give the folks creating these programs credit. They identified that the marketers want a way to send mail to purchased lists. But ESPs with good deliverability and reputations don’t allow purchased lists. ESPs that do allow purchased lists often have horrible delivery problems. Enter the spam enabling programs.
From the outside, the folks creating these programs have a design goal to permit spam without the negatives. What do I mean? I mean that the program feature set creates an environment where users can send spam without affect the rest of their mail.
The primary way the software prevents spam blocking is using Google, Amazon or Office 365 as their outbound mail server. Let’s be frank, these systems carry enough real mail, they’re unlikely to be widely blocked. These ISPs are also not geared up to deal with compliance the same way ESPs or consumer providers are.
There seem to be more and more of these companies around. I first learned of them when I started getting a lot of spam from vaguely legitimate companies through google mail servers. Some of them were even kind enough to inform me they were using Gmail as their marketing strategy.
I didn’t realize quite how big this space was, though. And it does seem to be getting even bigger.
Then a vendor in the space reached out looking for delivery help for them and their customers. Seems they were having some challenges getting mail into some ISPs. I told them I couldn’t help. They did mention 3 or 4 names of their competitors, to help me understand their business model.
Last week, one of the companies selling this sort of software asked me if I’d provide quotes for a blog article they were writing. This blog article was about various blocklists and how their software makes it such that their customers don’t really have to worry about blocking. According to the article, even domain based blocking isn’t an issue because they recommend using a domain completely separate from their actual domain. I declined to participate. I did spend a little time on their website just to see what they were doing.
This morning a vendor in the space joined one of the email slack channels I participate in asking for feedback on their software. Again, they provide software so companies can send spam through google outbound IPs. Discussions with the vendor made it clear that they take zero responsibility for how their software is used.
I don’t actually expect that even naming and shaming these companies facilitating spam will do anything to change their minds. They don’t care about the email ecosystem or how annoying their customers are. About the best they could do is accept opt-out requests from those of us who really don’t want to be bothered by their customers. Even that won’t really help, even domain based opt-outs are ineffective.
What needs to happen is companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft need to step up and enforce their anti-spam policies.
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