Reputation and "the cloud"

As Reddit recently learned it’s not a great idea to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host mailservers. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the reputation of mail coming from EC2 servers.
When you’re using machines in the cloud, changing IP addresses is as simple as initializing a new server. Spammers discovered this almost as soon as the EC2 cloud became public. They would set up a mailserver and send spam through that server until it was blocked. Then they’d just start another instance to avoid the block and keep spamming. They had an almost unlimited number of IP addresses to abuse and moving around was easy to do. Amazon did little to stop the spam coming from the cloud so many ISPs and spam filtering companies blocked email from the entire range of IP addresses allocated to the EC2 cloud.
Blocking large swathes of network space that are consistent sources of abuse is well accepted as a method of dealing with spam. Yes, this form of blocking has inconvenienced legitimate companies who aren’t actually doing anything wrong. But when a service provider doesn’t take sufficient action to stop customers from spamming through their networks, then ISPs will implement countermeasures.

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Reputation

It used to be that every potential client that called me up to ask me to help them with their delivery issues would tell me they weren’t a spammer. Over the last year or so that’s changed to telling me that they have a good reputation and don’t understand why they’re having delivery problems.
This leads me to believe that there is some confusion about what reputation is and what reputation is not.
Reputation is a shorthand term for a complex formula measuring the history of email from an IP address. Some reputation schemes measure the history of email containing a particular URL or domain.
Recipient domains measure a lot of things and use them at various points during the email transaction. Some measurements are integrated into a single value that is queried during the SMTP transaction. If the measurement is too bad, the email is rejected or rate limited. Other measurements are queried after the email is accepted by the ISP, and those values determine if an email is delivered to the inbox or the bulk folder.
There are a couple important things to remember about reputation.

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AOL EWL: low complaints no longer enough

This morning AOL announced some changes to their Enhanced White List. Given I’ve not talked very much about the AOL EWL in the past, this is as good a time as any to talk about it.
The AOL Enhanced Whitelist is for those senders that have very good practices. Senders on the EWL not only get their mail delivered to the inbox, but also have links and images enabled by default. Placement on the EWL is done solely on the basis of mail performance and only the best senders get on the list.
The new announcement this morning says that AOL will take more into account than just complaints. Previously, senders with the lowest complaint rates qualified for the EWL. Now, senders must also have a good reputation in addition to the low complaint rates. Good reputation is a measure of user engagement with a particular sender.
This change only reinforces what I and many other delivery experts have been saying: The secret to good delivery is to send mail recipients want. ISPs are making delivery decisions based on those measurements. Send mail that recipients want, and there are few delivery problems.
For a long time good delivery was tied closely to complaint rates, so senders focused on complaints. Spammers focused on complaints too, thus managing to actually get some of their spam delivered. ISPs noticed and started looking at other ways to distinguish wanted mail from spam. One of the better ways to separate spam from wanted mail is to look at user engagement. And the ISPs are measuring engagement and using that measurement as part of their decision making process. Send so much mail users don’t read it, and your reputation goes down followed by your delivery rates.

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Technology does not trump policy when it comes to delivery

Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is.
Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article, pointing out that the vast majority of things affecting delivery are under the control of the list owner, not under the control of the ESP. As they are both right, I clearly agree with them. I’ve also posted about reputation and delivery regularly.

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