There has been a lot of recent discussion and questions about reputation, content and delivery. I started to answer some of them, and then realized there weren’t any basic reference documents I could refer to when explaining the interaction. So I decided to write some. This first post is about IP address reputation with some background on why IPs are so important and why ISPs focus so...
I had the opportunity to go to a seminar and networking event hosted by Return Path yesterday evening. The topic was “Email trends in 2012” and it was presented by Tom Sather. If any of you get the opportunity to go to a talk presented by any of the Return Path folks I encourage you to do so. They know their stuff and their presentations are full of good information. One of the trends...
There is a contingent of senders and companies that seems to believe that receiver ISPs and filtering companies aren’t measuring reputation correctly. Over and over again the discussion comes up where senders think they can improve on how reputation is measured. One factor that is continually repeated is the size of the company. I’ve even seen a couple people suggest that corporate...
In my consulting, I emphasize that senders must set recipient expectations correctly. Receiver sites spend a lot of time listening to their users and design filters to let wanted and expected mail through. Senders that treat recipients as partners in their success usually have much better email delivery than those senders that treat recipients as targets or marks. Over the years I’ve heard...
My Mum flew in to visit last week, and over dinner one evening the talk turned to email. We don’t get much spam on Yahoo, mostly because we don’t give our email address out much. The only spam we really get is from <stockbroker website>, and that all goes to the spam folder. We use the site for checking stock quotes – it’s free, and we never see any of the spam they...
I’ve mentioned here before that I can usually tell when the big ISPs are making changes to their spam filtering as that ISP dominates my discussions with current and potential clients and many discussions on delivery mailing lists. The last two weeks the culprit has been Yahoo. They seem to be making a lot of changes to their filtering schemes right at the busiest email marketing time of...
When consulting with clients, I spend a lot of time trying to help them better understand the concept of sender reputation. Spam reports, feedback loops, and other data that comes from a collection of positive and negative reputational feedback about a company sending email. Certainly, the “This is not spam” action – moving an email from the spam folder to the inbox, or clicking...
There are a number of sites online that provide public information about reputation of an IP address or domain name. Sender Score – . Provided by Return Path. They collect data from some ISPs and blocklists. Using a proprietary formula, they calculate a sender score running from 1 – 100 for each IP address sending mail to their network. Higher scores means a better reputation. Can be...
IP based reputation is a measure of the quality of the mail coming from a particular IP address. Because of how reputation data is collected and evaluated it is difficult for third parties to provide a reputation score for a particular IP address. The data has to be collected in real time, or as close to real time as possible. Reputation is also very specific to the source of the data. I have...
As Reddit recently learned it’s not a great idea to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host mailservers. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the reputation of mail coming from EC2 servers. When you’re using machines in the cloud, changing IP addresses is as simple as initializing a new server. Spammers discovered this almost as soon as the EC2 cloud became public...
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