Resource hogging

Today on SFGate there was an article talking about how some Bay Area coffee houses were struggling to deal with workers who purchase one cup of coffee and then camp out all day using the free wifi. The final paragraph quoted one of the campers.

“We usually get one small coffee and stay for hours,” [Camilla Magrane] said. “Internet should be free.”

This type of resource abuse is obvious – customers can’t get tables to drink their coffee or have a quiet conversation with a companion. Less obvious is the type of resource abuse that ISPs have to deal with. Spammers avoid blocks by using botnets or frequently changing IP addresses (snowshoeing). ESPs open up tens or hundreds of connections at any one time. Delivery experts attempt to bypass published support channels and instead send direct messages to ISP employees hoping for a faster resolution to an issue.
All of these things use more than the sender’s share of resources and is very akin to buying a single cup of coffee and hogging up a table for a full day.

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Senders need to take responsibility

Having just returned home from another conference, my head is full of new ideas, new thoughts and new projects. I enjoy seeing old friends, making new contacts and sharing ideas. One thing I don’t enjoy, though, is listening to senders and marketers complaining about how hard it is to be a sender because the ISPs will not tell them what standards they need to meet.
If the ISPs would just tell us what they want us to do, we’ll do it.

The ISPs have told senders what they want them to do. They want senders to stop sending mail that their users don’t want. It is a very simple statement.
Stop sending spam.

For many senders, however, it’s not enough. “Tell us exactly what we need to do to stop sending spam. What complaint rates must we be under? What bounce rates do we have to be under? How do you want us to do this?” By this point in the conversation the ISP person is mentally rolling their eyes and looking for a way to escape the conversation.
The ISPs don’t want to tell senders how to behave, they want senders to start behaving. Stop sending spam should be all they need to tell senders.
Senders who ask for ISPs to tell them how to stop sending mail recipients think is spam are looking for specific thresholds they can stay under. They’re not really interested in actually sending wanted mail, they’re interested in sending good-enough mail, where good-enough mail is simply mail that gets to the inbox.
Want to know why ISPs don’t think much of many senders? Because the senders are not visibly taking any stand against abuse. I know there are a lot of senders out there who stop a lot of spam from ever leaving their systems, but there’s also a lot of unwanted mail that goes out, too. Some of that mail is even spam by any definition of the word. All the ISPs can see is the spam that gets through, and then they hear just tell us what to do and we’ll do it. From an ISP perspective, this means the senders only care about the thresholds and getting in under the ISPs’ radars.
Senders need to take more responsibility for the mail that goes out over their networks.
What do I mean by this? I mean senders need to stop waiting for the ISPs to define good practices. Senders need to implement standards and good practices just because they’re good practices, not because the ISPs are dictating the practices. Senders need to stop customers from doing bad things, and dump them if they won’t stop. Senders need to stop relying on ISPs for specific answers to why mail is being blocked. Senders need to take responsibility for the mail going across their networks.
It’s time for senders to grow up and stop relying on others for guidance. They shouldn’t implement good practices just because the ISPs tell them to, but instead should implement good practices because they are good practices.

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Blocking of ESPs

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on my post about upcoming changes that ESPs will be facing in the future. One thing some people read into the post is the idea that ISPs will be blocking ESPs wholesale without any regard for the quality of the mail from that company.
The idea that ESPs are at risk for blocking simply because they are ESPs has been floating around the industry based on comments by an employee at a spam filter vendor at a recent industry conference.
I talked to the company to get some clarification on what that spam filtering company is doing and hopefully to calm some of the concerns that people have.
First off, and probably most important, is that the spam filtering company in question primarily targets their service to enterprises. Filtering is an important part of this service, but it also handles email archiving, URL filtering and employee monitoring. The target market for the company is very different than the ISP market.
The ISPs are not talking about blocking indiscriminately, they are talking about blocking based on bad behavior.
Secondly, this option was driven by customer request. The customers of the spam filtering appliance were complaining about “legitimate” mail from various ESPs. Despite being reasonable targeted the mail was unrequested by the recipient. While ESPs use FBLs and other sources of complaints to clean complainers off rented or epended lists at ISPs, the option is not available for mail sent to corporations. Enterprises don’t, nor should they have to, create and support FBLs. Nor should employees be expected to unsubscribe from mail they never requested.
This option is the direct result of ESPs allowing customers to send spam.
Thirdly, this option is offered to those customers who ask for it. It is not done automatically for everyone. The option is also configurable down to the end user.
While I haven’t seen the options, nor which ESPs are affected, I expect that the ones on the list are the ones that the filtering vendor receives complaints about. If you are not allowing your customers to send spam, and are stopping them from buying lists or epending, then you probably have not come to the attention of the filtering company and are not on the list of ESPs to block.

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Tribes

Earlier Laura talked about a communication gap between ESPs and ISPs.
My take on it is that it’s something more than just a difficulty in communicating, rather it’s a division due to differences in personality and approach of those individuals whose primary interest is themselves and those whose primary interest is the health of the overall email ecosystem.
The former group (who I mentally refer to using the shorthand “frat boys“) want to make everything all about them, and their companies revenue, and their visibility in the industry, and their ego resume. Broad generalizations with little need for understanding are adequate to raise their visibility and keep them employed. Details aren’t that important to them. Dominating the conversation is. (Lest that sound negative, these are exactly the individuals who can thrive in sales, customer relations, bizdev and marketing environments.)
The latter (shorthand “utilitarians“) instinctively want to make email work well and to be useful for everyone. They want email to be a healthy, useful system and tend to believe that that means optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number. (If you’ve any philosophy background, think “felicific calculus as applied to email”). They tend to understand the system in much more detail than the frat boys, though maybe less than the mechanics. And they tend to be better at working together – as they’re more interested in hearing other peoples data in order to get better at what they do, rather than being there to convince others of their pre-decided agenda.
(There’s a third group I think of as “mechanics” who take more joy in the details of keeping the system running smoothly on a small scale, without much interest in the broader system, whether that be in a technical or business role. They tend not to be very interactive in public, though, so don’t have much impact at the level of conversations I’m thinking about).
While I hate the broad terms “senders” and “receivers” used to (falsely) divide the industry into two disjoint halves, I’m painting with a fairly broad brush here, so I’m going to stick with them.
There are quite a few of all three types of people at both senders and receivers – but their power and visibility varies.
At senders there’s a mix of frat boys and utilitarians in operational and policy making positions, but the frat boys tend to have a lot more public visibility – they’re the ones who are trying to be visible, to dominate the conversation, and they’re the people you tend to see doing all the talking and less of the listening, whether it be on industry mailing lists or at the microphone at a conference. Because of their greater visibility, they’re who you think of when you think of senders, and typically they’ll be the ones you end up interacting with most in any random mix of individuals from senders.
At receivers the  operational (as opposed to policy) level is where the real decision making power is as far as email is concerned, and it’s heavily dominated by the utilitarians. (In fact, the more visible frat boys I can think of who were in influential positions at receivers are mostly now working on behalf of senders).
Frat boys are very, very bad at communicating with utilitarians. And utilitarians find it very hard to discuss issues they consider serious with frat boys at anything deeper than a superficial level.
Mechanics aren’t great at communicating with strangers in anything other than a fairly friendly environment, but manage best with other mechanics or with utilitarians.
If you’re a C level manager at a sender, and you’re deciding which of your staff are well suited to collaborate with typical receiver staff that’s something important to consider. The public face of the recievers are probably utilitarians. Frat boys are the worst representatives to send out to talk to them.

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