Is Amazon SES a reputable place to send mail from

On the first installment of our Wednesday question series, I chose a question from twitter.

Can you advise is Amazon SES is a reputable place to send email from? @inkpixelspaper

This is a great question. In many cases the reputation of a provider doesn’t affect delivery, but as with almost everything in email there are exceptions and cases where a poor provider reputation may affect delivery of mail from all their customers. In almost all of the cases, though, the underlying issue is the provider not requiring good behaviour from their customers.
A common scenario is a provider (either ISP or ESP) not having the time, resources or desire to handle an abuse desk. Complaints about spam don’t get handled and ISPs and filtering companies just start blocking more and more of the IP space. More and more customers, even the ones who are sending wanted, opt-in mail find their delivery starting to suffer. Customers that have good polices start moving elsewhere. At the same time, customers that have been tossed off other providers start migrating to that provider.
This scenario is more common with shared IP addresses, where a few bad apple customers can cause problems for everyone on that IP address. But I have also seen it happen with providers who offer dedicated IP addresses, particularly if those providers move problem customers around in order to avoid blocks or filters.
What does this mean in terms of Amazon SES? It means that their reputation is dependent on how good their policies are and how well they manage their outgoing mail streams and their customers.
AmazonSES does not, apparently, have any IPs currently listed on the SBL. Senderscores for their IP addresses range from 100 down to the mid-60’s. Senderbase shows most of the IPs have a generally good reputation. This tells me if you’re sending to domains that feed into senderscore and senderbase, then you’re probably not going to have delivery problems based on Amazon’s reputation.
On a more personal note, though, we are getting quite a bit of spam from AmazonSES customers. Despite repeated complaints, Amazon appears not to be taking any action against those customers. In fact, Amazon isn’t even telling customers not to send to people who complain.
We don’t block by IP address for a number of reasons, but if we did block by IP, the AmazonSES range sends us enough spam and little enough real mail that it would probably be blocked here. This tells me that if you’re sending to small and medium sized business domains or personal domains you may have delivery problems based on Amazon’s reputation.
Ultimately, though, the public sources of information indicate that using AmazonSES may not hurt your email delivery. But, as with everything in email, TEST TEST TEST. There’s no setup fee, so set it up and see how it works for you. Test sends to your business domain, set up accounts at gmail, yahoo, hotmail and aol to test delivery to those places.
Also, know that a provider’s reputation is not static. Personnel changes, policy changes, and customer changes can all affect a provider’s reputation. A little sloppiness with handling abuse complaints or letting a customer or two slide in the short term won’t really affect delivery for other customers. Letting those things slide over the long term can hurt delivery for even good customers. Don’t assume that because a provider is good or bad today that they’ll still be good or bad in a year.
 
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Have a question you want answered? tweet them to @wise_laura or send them to laura-questions@wordtothewise.com

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Hunting the Human Representative

Yesterday’s post was inspired by a number of questions I’ve fielded recently from people in the email industry. Some were clients, some were colleagues on mailing lists, but in most cases they’d found a delivery issue that they couldn’t solve and were looking for the elusive Human Representative of an ISP.
There was a time when having a contact inside an ISP was almost required to have good delivery. ISPs didn’t have very transparent systems and SMTP rejection messages weren’t very helpful to a sender. Only a very few ISPs even had postmaster pages, and the information there wasn’t always helpful.
More recently that’s changed. It’s no longer required to have a good relationship at the ISPs to get inbox delivery. I can point to a number of reasons this is the case.
ISPs have figured out that providing postmaster pages and more information in rejection messages lowers the cost of dealing with senders. As the economy has struggled ISPs have had to cut back on staff, much like every other business out there. Supporting senders turned into a money and personnel sink that they just couldn’t afford any longer.
Another big issue is the improvement in filters and processing power. Filters that relied on IP addresses and IP reputation did so for mostly technical reasons. IP addresses are the one thing that spammers couldn’t forge (mostly) and checking them could be done quickly so as not to bottleneck mail delivery. But modern fast processors allow more complex information analysis in short periods of time. Not only does this mean more granular filters, but filters can also be more dynamic. Filters block mail, but also self resolve in some set period of time. People don’t need to babysit the filters because if sender behaviour improves, then the filters automatically notice and fall off.
Then we have authentication and the protocols now being layered on top of that. This is a technology that is benefiting everyone, but has been strongly influenced by the ISPs and employees of the ISPs. This permits ISPs to filter on more than just IP reputation, but to include specific domain reputations as well.
Another factor in the removal of the human is that there are a lot of dishonest people out there. Some of those dishonest people send mail. Some of them even found contacts inside the ISPs. Yes, there are some bad people who lied and cheated their way into filtering exceptions. These people were bad enough and caused enough problems for the ISPs and the ISP employees who were lied to that systems started to have fewer and fewer places a human could override the automatic decisions.
All of this contributes to the fact that the Human Representative is becoming a more and more elusive target. In a way that’s good, though; it levels the playing field and doesn’t give con artists and scammers better access to the inbox than honest people. It means that smaller senders have a chance to get mail to the inbox, and it means that fewer people have to make judgement calls about the filters and what mail is worthy or not. All mail is subject to the same conditions.
The Human Representative is endangered. And I think this is a good thing for email.

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What matters for reputation?

There is a contingent of senders and companies that seems to believe that receiver ISPs and filtering companies aren’t measuring reputation correctly. Over and over again the discussion comes up where senders think they can improve on how reputation is measured.
One factor that is continually repeated is the size of the company. I’ve even seen a couple people suggest that corporate net worth should be included in the reputation calculation.
The problem with this suggestion is that just because a company is big or has a high net worth or is on the Fortune500 doesn’t mean that the mail they send isn’t spam. I’ve certainly received spam from large, name brand companies (and organizations). I’ve also consulted with a number of those companies who bought or appended a list and then had to deal with the fallout from a Spamhaus listing or upstream disconnection.
Sure, there is a certain logic to company size and prominence being a part of a reputation calculation. For instance, my experience suggests consumers who recognize a brand are less likely to treat mail as “spam” even if they didn’t sign up for the mail in the first place. Certainly there are large brands (Kraft, FTDDirect, 1-800–Flowers, OfficeDepot) that have been caught sending mail to people who never opted in to their lists.
Many people don’t realize that company size and prominence are already factored into the reputation scores. No ISPs don’t look at a mail and, if it’s authenticated, add in a little positive because it’s part of a giant, name brand company. Rather, the recipients change how they interact with the mail. Even recipients who didn’t sign for mail from Office Depot may click through and purchase from an offer. Some recipients recognizing the brand will hit delete instead of “this is spam.”
All of these things mean that big brands have recognition that takes into account that they are prominent brands. Elaborate processes and extra reputation points given to big brands don’t need to happen, they’re already an innate part of the system.
 

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Thanks for your questions!

Thanks, everyone, who submitted questions to laura-questions@wordtothewise.com. We’ve gotten some great questions to answer here on the blog. I’m working through the emails and contacting folks if I have questions. I’ll be answering the first question on Wednesday.
I also did have someone harvest the address off the website and send me non-CAN SPAM compliant spam to it. I have to admit, I didn’t expect someone to harvest the address at all, but especially not within 12 hours of posting an address. Particularly someone who’s not harvested our contact address previously. I also am considering how much content I could get detailing taking the spammer to court in CA for violating CAN SPAM and the CA anti-spam statute.
 

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