SenderScore update

Matt has posted a bit more about the SenderScore Blacklist, following up on my post about the changes at Comcast. George Bilbrey, VP and General Manager, for Return Path followed up with him to explain a bit more about the blacklist. George says:

  • The blacklist is based on more than the summary Sender Score on average, IPs on the blacklist have a score much, much less than 70.
  • There is not a direct relationship between the blacklist and Sender Score Certified.
  • You can’t buy yourself off the blacklist with Sender Score Certified and it is not possible to be on both the blacklist and qualify for SSC.
  • We don’t pitch any of our services to folks who have contacted us because they have been blocked.

Matt is looking for experiences from people. My experiences are as follows.

  1. My client that was blocked by Comcast, with the reject message referencing the SenderScore blacklist, had a SenderScore of 65.
  2. Comcast suggests that senders sign up for the Comcast FBL as part of the remediation for a SenderScore block. The Comcast FBL is a service provided by ReturnPath. During the signup process at a ReturnPath branded website, there is a note that says, “We may email you about your registration, service updates, and information on existing and new Return Path products.”

I know just how difficult it is to run a blacklist while offering services to those who are blacklisted. My first job in the delivery arena was trying to manage the services division at MAPS (now Trend Micro). MAPS was just offering a range of blacklists and outsourced abuse management services.
ReturnPath is offering a whole host of services. They are a reputation service, they are a blacklist service, they are a whitelist service, they are a FBL service. On top of all that, they are also an acquisition mailer and an email list provider.
Based on my own experience it is very difficult to sell services to companies that you are blacklisting. It is also difficult to sell services to companies you are directly competing with. It remains to be seen if ReturnPath can successfully manage such a diverse and conflicting range of services.

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Blogroll

I added a few blogs to my blogroll today.
Terry Zink works at Microsoft handling spam blocking issues for one of their platforms. His posts offer insight into how recipient administrators view spam filtering. He has a long, information dense series of posts on email authentication.
E-mail, tech policy, and more is written by John Levine, a general expert on almost everything internet, especially spam and abuse issues. He posts somewhat irregularly about interesting things he sees and hears about spam, abuse, internet law and other things.
Justin Mason’s blog contains information from the primary SpamAssassin developer. Like Terry’s blog, it gives readers some insight into the thought process of people creating filters.
Al Iverson’s blogs have been on my blogroll for a while now. His DNSBL resource contains information about various DNSBL and how they work against a single, well defined mail stream. His spam resource blog provides information about delivery and email marketing from someone who has been in the industry as long as I have.
Email Karma is Matt Verhout’s blog and contains a lot of useful delivery information.
No man is an iland provides practical information on marketing by email. Some of the information is delivery related, a lot more of it is solid marketing information. Mark often points to useful studies and information posted around the net.
MonkeyBrains has always entertaining and informative articles about delivery, email marketing and practical ways to make your email marketing more effective.

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Email standards at the email client

The Email Standards Project launched last week. This group is looking to lobby and encourage companies to make their email clients comply with HTML display standards. They are also identifying how different clients display email with HTML. Check out their website, and see what they’re doing.
I do apologize for the light blogging recently. I have a couple big deadlines on my plate. I hope to get back to regular blogging soon.

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Best practices and ISPs

A couple articles came out today talking about ISP requirements and how to find them.
EmailInsider talks about ISP best practices and how merely complying with CAN-SPAM is not enough to get good delivery at the ISPs.
Meanwhile, over at ClickZ, Stefan talks about what the ISPs want from you and how to find the information online.

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