Monetizing the complaint stream

laura
Industry
July 14, 2014

What if ESPs (and ISPs, for that matter) started charging users for every complaint generated? Think of it like peak pricing for electricity. In California, businesses can opt for discounted power, with the agreement that they are the first companies shut off if electrical demand exceeds supply. What if ESPs and ISPs offered discounted hosting rates to bulk senders who agreed to pay per complaint?
I see pricing scheme something like this.

$5.00 per FBL message.
$50 for a hand written complaint.
$150 for a report of a spamtrap hit.
$500 for an ISP temporary block.
$10K for a major blacklisting (SBL, other filtering company).
$5K per customer if the blacklisting affects other customers’ ability to send.

ESPs could give a threshold of complaints that are covered. For instance, every per-complaint customer gets 0.05% of their total volume in free FBL complaints. Hand written complaints they get one or two every billing cycle, not to exceed 12 complaints a year. 6 spam trap hits a year. There is a bit of grace in the handling. I can think of lots of ways to make this sender friendly.

Benefits to the Sender

Good senders benefit because they get lower rates and don’t risk much in the way of complaint related expenses. They don’t have to pay that hidden compliance fee that all ESPs customers currently pay.
Senders with more aggressive email programs benefit because they’re able to shoulder the risks associated with those programs directly. The ESP has less to say about buying or renting lists because instead of the ESP paying the cost of problems, the customer assumes that cost. Even better, the sender can pass the compliance cost back onto their list vendor. Imagine being able to tell a vendor they have to discount a list based on the number of complaints or delivery problems. Instead of the vendor selling a list with no incentive for that list to perform well, the vendor now has an incentive to make sure those opt-in addresses really are opt-in.

Benefits to the ESP

The ESP benefits because no longer is their abuse and compliance desk a cost center. With the right mix of clients it may even become a profit center. Plus, the compliance desk is guaranteed to be funded at a rate that covers the work needed to maintain a reasonable delivery rate for customers. The ESP can stop spending so much time telling customers they can’t do something and more time raking in the cash.
It’s a total win for everyone.
Monetize complaints. It’s the future of email.

Do you have an abuse@ address?

I’ve mentioned multiple times before that I really don’t like using personal contacts until and unless the published or official channels fail. I don’t hold this opinion just about resolving delivery issues, but also use official channels when reporting spam to one of my addresses or spam traps.
My usual complaints contain a plain text copy of the mail, including full headers and a short summary of the email address it was sent to. “This is an address that was part of a leak from…” or “This is an address scraped off my website. It’s been removed from the website since 2004” or “This address isn’t used to sign up for any mail.”
Sadly, there are a number of “legitimate” ESPs that don’t have or don’t monitor their abuse address. In some cases it’s an oversight or a break down of internal mail handling. But in most cases, it’s a sign that the ESP doesn’t actually handle abuse.
It’s frustrating to watch an ESP post long blog posts about “best practices” and “effective delivery” and “not spamming” and yet not be able to actually stop their own customers from spamming. It’s not even that I necessarily want them to disconnect their spamming customers (although that would be nice) but suppressing the address that I’ve told them was a spamtrap seems trivial. And yet, a month after my first complaint and weeks after escalating to a personal contact, I’m still getting spam.
The 5 things every ESP should do to handle spam complaints.

Are FBLs required for a clean mail stream?

A few years ago I would have said that a good mailer could have a good mailing program without necessarily participating in FBL programs. I’m not convinced that’s true any longer. As the mailbox providers and ISPs develop more complex filtering methodologies, it’s important for senders to get any possible feedback from recipients. That press on the this-is-spam button may not actually mean the mail is spam, but it does mean that recipient really didn’t like the message.
Getting the feedback lets a sender fine tune their sending processes and better target what their recipients want to receive.
I do think that senders need to know what users are saying about their email. When users hit the T-i-S button then that is valuable information about how the recipients think about the mail. Senders really on top of things can use positive data (opens and clicks) and negative data (FBLs and unsubscribes) to monitor how wanted their email is and make adjustments to their sending stream.

Gmail FBL update

Last week Gmail started contacting ESPs that signed up for their new FBL with more information on how to set up mailings to receive FBL emails.
One of the struggles some ESPs are having is the requirement for DKIM signing. Many of the bigger ESPs have clients that sign with their own domains. Gmail is telling these ESPs to insert a second DKIM signature to join the FBL.
There are a couple reasons this is not as simple or as doable as Gmail seems to think, and the challenges are technical as well as organizational.
The technical challenges are pretty simple. As of now, not all the bulk MTAs support multiple signatures. I’ve heard that multiple signatures are being tested by these MTA vendors, but they’re not in wide use. This makes it challenging for these ESPs to just turn on multiple signatures. For ESPs that are using open source software, there’s often a lot of customization in their signing infrastructure. Even if they have the capability to dual sign, if they’re not currently using that there is testing needed before turning it on.
None of the technical challenges are show stoppers, but they are certainly show delayers.
The organizational challenges are much more difficult to deal with. These are cases where the ESP customer doesn’t want the ESP to sign. The obvious situation is with large banks. They want everything in their infrastructure and headers pointing at the bank, not at their ESP. They don’t want to have that second signature in their email for multiple reasons. I can’t actually see an ESP effectively convincing the various stakeholders, including the marketing, security and legal staff, that allowing the ESP to inset a second signature is good practice. I’m not even sure it is good practice in those cases, except to get stats from Gmail.
Hopefully, Gmail will take feedback from the ESPs and change their FBL parameters to allow ESPs to get information about their customers who sign with their own domain.