Monitoring customers at ESPs

In the past I’ve talked about vetting clients, and what best effort encompasses when ESPS try to keep bad actors out of their systems. But what does an ESP do to monitor clients ongoing? Al Iverson from ExactTarget says that they:

Look at what clients are doing constantly. If too much of a client’s list is filtered out at import, If too much of their mail bounces, If they receive too many spam complaints from a large ISP, If they get blacklisted by a reputable blacklist like Spamhaus or Spamcop, Or if they do something that shows [ET] that they’re not complying with the opt-in consent requirements contained in [the] contract.

If any of those things happen, what happens next?

The client is funneled through a policy enforcement/best practices process to help address the issue, reform the process, remove the bad list, educate the client, and, if those steps all fail, terminate that client.

Read the rest of what Al has to say here:
http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/al-iverson/0/0/exacttarget-and-stopping-spam

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Long ago I was handling the abuse desk at the very large network provider. This was in the days before Feedback loops, so every complaint was an actual forwarded email from a recipient. Generally, we saw a couple dozen complaints about any individual spam problem. Not a huge volume by any means, but that meant that any volume of complaints was significant.
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