Contacting an ISP that doesn't have a postmaster page

How do you contact an ISP about a block that doesn’t have a postmaster page? While there’s no one answer, I do have some suggestions.
Start by contacting the postmaster@ or abuse@ addresses. For smaller ISPs, the same people handling outbound abuse are the people handling inbound filtering.
When you contact them have the following:

  • What IPs you’re sending from.
  • What the rejection message is (or if it’s not a rejection message, that the mail is undelivered or going to bulk).
  • The recipient you’re sending to.
  • The type of message.

Keep the message short and sweet. Do not send 5 paragraphs about your business model. I’ve been on the receiving end of the 5 paragraphs of your business model, as have so many of the ISPs that it’s turned into a joke among delivery: “Let me tell you about my business model…” They don’t care, they just want to know what the problem.
The message should have 3 (short!) sections.

  1. State the problem: “Mail I am sending from IP address is consistently going to the bulk folder. These are [sales receipts / tickets / bills / newsletters].”
  2. State what you’ve done to fix it:”We have changed our delivery in X fashion” (limited connections, improved data hygiene, stopped mailing very old addresses, fired the idiot sales guy who decided spamming was a good idea, whatever it is).
  3. Ask for a resolution: We’d like to know what you are seeing from our mail server that’s causing you to think this mail is unwanted by your recipients. I’ve attached a copy of the blocked / bulked message.

You MUST include the sending IP address in all correspondence. I can’t emphasize this enough. Without the IP, no one can help you. Without the IP they may even not bother to answer you. Without the IP the only response you will get it “what’s the IP?”
Also, don’t try and call. I know a lot of people prefer using phone to email, but in this case, use email. Calls are mostly useless.
The biggest issue is that getting an IP address over the phone is horrible. But when the IP is in an email, it’s a simple cut and paste into the internal tools. But there are also communication and documentation issues. Some ISPs like to have records of discussions about blocking and unblocking. On the communication level, when things are written down then no one is relying on faulty memories or hastily written notes about what needs to happen.
At smaller ISPs or even some small businesses, you can ask your recipients to talk to their support desk or admin.If the ISPs have customers telling them the email is wanted they’re much more likely to make filtering adjustments.

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Spamhaus changes

A number of ESPs are reporting an increase in SBL listings of big, well known brands. InterestingSBLs seems to confirm this.
Just on the month of June I see tweets reporting SBL listings for: Disney (again, and again) AAA Michigan, NRCC, the Mitt Romney campaign, Macy’s (again) Facebook, Walmart Brazil, Safeway, Bacardi.
What happened? I think there are a number of reasons for an increase in SBL listings of well known brands.
The first is that botnets are rapidly becoming a solved problem. That’s not to say that they’ve gone away, or that we should stop being vigilant about the spam and malicious mail coming out of them, but that there are more and better tools to deal with botnets than there have been in the past. That means that the folks at Spamhaus can look at different classes of unsolicited email.
I believe Spamhaus has some new mail feeds that let them see mail they were previously not seeing. Anyone who has multiple email addresses can tell you that the type of spam that one address gets is often vastly different than the type of mail another email address gets. When dealing with spamtrap feeds, that means that there is unsolicited mail that isn’t seen by the feed. I know there are companies who claim to have lists of hundreds of thousands of spamtraps, and I don’t doubt that some enterprising spammers have discovered Spamhaus spamtraps in the past. Adding new feeds means that Spamhaus will see spam that they were previously missing due to their traps being compromised.
As well as bringing up new feeds, I suspect Spamhaus has better tools to mine the data. This means they can see patterns and problem senders in a clearer way and list those that meet the Spamhaus listing criteria.
I’m not saying the Spamhaus standards have changed. Spamhaus has always said they will list anyone sending unsolicited bulk email. But, as with many organizations what they could do was limited by the available resources. That resource allocation has changed and they can deal with more senders.
What does all this mean for senders? In a perfect world it wouldn’t mean anything. Senders would actually be sending mail only to people who had asked to receive it. Senders would have good list hygiene and pull off abandoned addresses long before they could be turned into spamtraps.
But we all know this isn’t a perfect world. There are a lot of senders that have lists with years of cruft on them. And not all of those addresses on the list actually opted-in to receive that mail. Many of those senders have good stats, decent opens, low unknown user rates, and low complaint rates. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems with the lists. And those hidden problems may mean that just because you haven’t had a Spamhaus listing in the past doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be one in your future. It means senders who want to avoid SBL listings need to pay attention to list hygiene and dead addresses. It means the source of addresses and their audit trail is even more important than ever.
Meanwhile, ESPs are struggling to cope with the ongoing and increasing SBL listings.
EDIT: Mickey attributes some of the increase in listings to Spamhaus being better able to detect appended lists.

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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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Delivery emergencies and the holidays

There is a lot of contention between ISPs and senders at the best of times. As we move into the holiday season, retailers are increasing their email marketing, sometimes quite significantly. This causes more delivery issues as recipients and MTAs react to the increased volume.
At many non retail companies, however, the pace of work slows down. There are distractions and office parties and people taking long lunches to finish their holiday shopping. Non-critical departments are not staffed for official holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
This means that delivery issues may not be responded to as quickly as senders might like. Just this morning I got a call from someone who wants his delivery issues to be fixed by tomorrow. I’m sorry, even if I were to treat this as an emergency, there is work and investigation that needs to be done at the ISP end, and they’re not necessarily going to have a staffed delivery desk on Thanksgiving day. And even if they do have a staffed desk, it’s possible the staff won’t be focused and issues won’t be handled as fast as they might otherwise be.
I’d love to help, but there’s a limit to what I can do. Filtering decisions are made by the ISP, or their filter vendor, and sometimes they don’t happen as fast as we’d like. It’s frustrating for senders to have to deal with, but these are the realities of email delivery.

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