Questions about Spamhaus

I have gotten a lot of questions about Spamhaus since I’ve been talking about them on the blog and on various mailing lists. Those questions can be condensed and summed up into a single thought.

What engagement metrics should I monitor to avoid a Spamhaus listing?

First off Spamhaus doesn’t care about about engagement.
Spamhaus wants you to stop mailing people who never asked to receive mail from you. That’s all.
Stop sending unsolicited bulk email. Period.
Engagement is mostly used by the large ISPs who are trying to work out which of you are sending mail people asked for and which of you are just harvesting addresses and spamming wildly. They’re using engagement as part of their metrics to separate out the good from the bad.
The only time engagement comes into play with Spamhaus is when you hire people like me to help you get out of the hole you’ve dug yourself. Those people like me? We tell you, “Well, Spamhaus wants you to go COI, but I think we can fix this problem without having to go so aggressive. I think if we fix your collection processes going forward and remove unengaged people, then you’ll only be mailing people who want to receive mail from you.” And then we go to bat for you with Spamhaus.
And I’ve made it work before so so they’ll give you a chance to have me help you stop being spammers. Not only do my methods work to stop future listings, some of my clients have reported a doubling of revenue from emails.
If marketers would stop sending mail to people who never asked to receive it, they would never have to deal with a Spamhaus block ever again. Spamhaus doesn’t go out of their way to look for senders, they just passively monitor addresses that have never asked for mail. Stop hitting those addresses and magically all your Spamhaus problems will go away.