One of my mailing lists was asking questions today about an increase in invitation mailings from Spotify. I’d heard about them recently, so I started digging through my mailbox to see if I’d received one of these invites. I hadn’t, but it clued me into a blog post from early this year that I hadn’t seen before.
Research: ESPs might get you blacklisted.
That article is full of FUD, and the author quite clearly doesn’t understand what the data he is relying on means. He also doesn’t provide us with enough information that we can repeat what he did.
But I think his take on the publicly available data is common. There are a lot of people who don’t quite understand what the public data means or how it is collected. We can use his post as a starting off point for understanding what publicly available data tells us.
The author chooses 7 different commercial mailers as his examples. He claims the data on these senders will let us evaluate ESPs, but these aren’t ESPs. At best they’re ESP customers, but we don’t know that for sure. He claims that shared IPs means shared reputation, which is true. But he doesn’t claim that these are shared IPs. In fact, I would bet my own reputation on Pizza Hut having dedicated IP addresses.
The author chooses 4 different publicly available reputation services to check the “marketing emails” against. I am assuming he means he checked the sending IP addresses because none of these services let you check emails.
He then claims these 4 measures
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