Tools for monitoring email

A number of groups provide tools for monitoring email performance.
Some of these tools are provided by ISPs, like Hotmail and AOL have postmaster webpages. Hotmail also provides things like SNDS so you can monitor what Hotmail is seeing about your network.
Al has a new blacklist stats center over at DNSBL.com. Of interest is the accuracy of some of the widely used lists like Spamhaus, Spamcop, and PSBL. Other lists like FiveTen were wildly inaccurate. In fact, Al has shown that blocking mail from any IP with a 7 in it is more accurate (more spam hits, less non-spam hits) than FiveTen.
ReturnPath provides free reputation lookup and monitoring based on the data they acquire.

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Goodmail

Goodmail made a splash on the email marketing and ISP industries a few years ago by announcing their CertifiedEmail program. They guaranteed that using their certification would result in email going directly to the inbox, and all images in the email would be displayed by default. Senders using Goodmail would pay money, per message, and Goodmail would split that money with the receiving ISP.
This sounds very much like a situation where everyone wins. The senders get their mail to the inbox with images turned on. The receiving ISPs get a little money to deliver email and offloads some of their sender screening onto a third party. Individual recipients know that this email is certified and that it’s safe to click on links in the email.
In the time since CertifiedEmail has been announced, however, there seems to be very little adoption. Sure, receivers do seem to be signing up, a little. AOL and Yahoo have been using CertifiedEmail for a while. In summer 2007, a number of cable providers announced they would be using CertifiedEmail as well.
Senders, on the other hand, don’t seem to be adopting this as fast as Goodmail might like. The Federal Government recently announced they would be sending email signed by Goodmail and some large online companies, Overstock.com among them, are also sending with certified email. In order to get more companies to sign up for CertifiedEmail, Goodmail announced in August 2007 that they had partnered with CheetahMail, Episilon and Axciom Digital to provide free CertifiedEmail to qualifying customers of those ESPs.
Why might companies not be adopting CertifiedEmail? I have a couple of thoughts.

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IP Reputation Portability

Matt posted a discussion of the portability of IP reputation over at his EmailKarma blog.
I have heard about Hotmail/MSN’s claim that if you add your new IPs to your SPF/SenderID record and send from your old IPs that your old IP reputation will transfer to your new IPs. I’ve not heard it working in practice, but it really can’t hurt to add your new IPs to your records as soon as you know what they are.

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Busy Busy.

Getting ready to head to MAAWG next week. We leave for the plane in a couple hours. I expect there will be some interesting information coming out of the talks and sessions and will be sharing some of the more interesting bits throughout the week.
Also, Steve has written a new tool to visualize blacklists. He’s put up a beta version. It still has a few bugs and missing features, but there are already some interesting patterns in XBL data with it.
The demo installation only displays XBL data (rather than letting you overlay multiple datasets) and is missing search and bookmarking, amongst other things. Enough disclaimers yet?

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