Trend/MAPS
Want some history?
I was doing some research today for an article I’m working on. The research led me to a San Francisco Law Review article from 2001 written by David E. Sorkin. Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Electronic Mail (.pdf link). The text itself is a little outdated, although not as much as I expected. There’s quite a good discussion of various ways to control spam, most of which are still true and even relevant.
From a historical perspective, the footnotes are the real meat of the document. Professor Sorkin discusses many different cases that together establish the rights of ISPs to filter mail, some of which I wasn’t aware of. He also includes links to then-current news articles about filtering and spam. He also mentions different websites and articles written by colleagues and friends from ‘back in the day’ discussing spam on a more theoretical level.
CNET articles on spam and filtering was heavily referenced by Professor Sorkin. One describes the first Yahoo spam folder. Some things never change, such as Yahoo representatives refusing to discuss how their system works. There were other articles discussing Hotmail deploying the MAPS RBL (now a part of Trend Micro) and then adding additional filters into the mix a few weeks later.
We were all a little naive back then. We thought the volumes of email and spam were out of control. One article investigated the effectiveness of filters at Yahoo and Hotmail, and quoted a user who said the filters were working well.
The sledgehammer of confirmed opt-in
We focused Monday on Trend/MAPS blocking fully confirmed opt-in (COI) mail, because that is the Gold Standard for opt-in. It is also Trend/MAPS stated policy that all mail should be COI. There are some problems with this approach. The biggest is that Trend/MAPS is confirming some of the email they receive and then listing COI senders.
The other problem is that typos happen by real people signing up for mail they want. Because MAPS is using typo domains to drive listings, they’re going to see a lot of mail from companies that are doing single opt-in. I realize that there are problems with single opt-in mail, but the problems depends on a lot of factors. Not all single opt-in lists are full of traps and spam and bad data.
In fact, one ESP has a customer with a list of more than 50 million single opt-in email addresses. This sender mails extremely heavily, and yet sees little to no blocking by public or private blocklists.
Trend/MAPS policy is singling out senders that are sending mail people signed up to receive. We know for sure that hard core spammers spend a lot of time and money to identify spamtraps. The typo traps that Trend/MAPS use are pretty easy to find and I have no doubt that the real, problematic spammers are pulling traps out of their lists. Legitimate senders, particularly the ESPs, aren’t going to do that. As one ESP rep commented on yesterday’s post: