Preferences pages

As often as I talk about how badly companies send mail, I think it’s always a good idea to highlight when I find companies doing good things.
Today’s example of a company making me happy is Sur la Table. I’ve been on their mailing list for quite a while and do enjoy the offers and information they send. With the advent of the holiday cooking season, though, they’ve massively increased their volume. 21 emails in September, 25 emails in October and 37 emails in the month of November.

SLT: preference pages done well
This is how you do preference pages
I received two emails today and decided that the ever increasing volume was not a good fit for what I wanted. I decided, somewhat sadly, to go ahead and unsubscribe from their list. Maybe I’d remember to resub after Jan 1, as I actually like their mail.
I clicked “unsub” and was immediately taken to their preference page. And oh boy was I pleased! They offered multiple options for lowering the volume of mail they were sending in a very simple to navigate page.
And, yes, I did actually choose the twice a week option. Because I do like their mail, just not multiple times a day.
Thanks, Sur La Table, for caring enough about engagement and relevancy to let me have some say in the volume of mail you send me.

Email attacks
GFI/SORBS considered harmful

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Public reputation data

IP based reputation is a measure of the quality of the mail coming from a particular IP address. Because of how reputation data is collected and evaluated it is difficult for third parties to provide a reputation score for a particular IP address. The data has to be collected in real time, or as close to real time as possible. Reputation is also very specific to the source of the data. I have seen cases where a client has a high reputation at one ISP and a low reputation at another.
All this means is that there are a limited number of public sources of reputation data. Some ISPs provide ways that senders can check reputation at that ISP. But if a sender wants to check a broader reputation across multiple ISPs where can they go?
There are multiple public sources of data that I use to check reputation of client IP addresses.
Blocklists provide negative reputation data for IP addresses and domain names. There are a wide range of blocklists with differing listing criteria and different levels of trust in the industry. Generally the more widely used a list the more accurate and relevant it is. Generally I check the Spamhaus lists and URIBL/SURBL when investigating a client. I find these lists are good sources for discovering real issues or problems.
For an overall view into the reputation of an IP address, both positive and negative, I check with senderbase.org provided by Ironport and senderscore.org provided by ReturnPath.
All reputation sources have limitations. The primary limitation is they are only as good as their source data, and their source data is kept confidential. Another major limitation is reputation sources are only as good as the reputation of the maintainer. If the maintainer doesn’t behave with integrity then there is no reason for me to trust their data.
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This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
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Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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