There is no bat phone

I don’t have much to add to Al’s post about the lack of people to call at different ISPs to get mail delivered. I will say there was a time some ISPs had staff that would deal with senders and blocking problems. But those positions have gradually been eliminated over the last 2 or 3 years. In some cases the employees left for greener pastures, in others they were subject to layoffs and budget cuts. In most cases, though, the employees were not replaced.
ISPs have moved to complex and multi-tired spam filtering. They’ve removed the ability of most employees to actually interrupt the filtering and special case a sender. Getting mail delivered is about sending mail that recipients want. It’s not about who you know. It’s about how much recipients like your mail.

Related Posts

Spam makes only 200MM dollars a year

Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Justin Rao of Microsoft and David Reiley of Google (who met working at Yahoo) have teamed up to estimate the cost of spam to society relative to its worldwide revenues. The societal price tag comes to $20 billion. The revenue? A mere $200 million. As they note, that means that the “‘externality ratio’ of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100:1. Spammers are dumping a lot on society and reaping fairly little in return.” In case it’s not clear, this is a suboptimal situation. The Atlantic

Read More

Facebook blocking spam: parallels to email filtering

Last month a Dangerous Minds posted numbers that indicated their Facebook posts were reaching fewer users.  They suggested that this was a conspiracy by Facebook to make more money and soak small publishers with “exorbitant” advertising fees. I didn’t pay that much attention to it. I use Facebook to communicate with friends. The only commercial entities I “like” or are “friends” with are small local businesses that I shop at.
Today, I see a tweet from Ben Chestnut that looked intriguing.

Read More

Don't spam filter your role accounts

A variety of “amazon.com order confirmations” showed up in my inbox this morning. They were quite well done, looking pretty close to real Amazon branding, so quite a few people will click on them. And they funnel people who do click to websites that contain hostile flash apps that’ll compromise their machines (and steal their private data, login and banking credentials then add them to botnets to attack other sites and so on).
Not good. Just the sort of urgent, high-risk issue that ISP abuse desks really want to hear about. I sent email about it to the ISPs involved, including a copy of the original email. One of them went to iWeb, a big (tens of thousands of servers) hosting company.
This was the response:

Read More