Recent Posts

Amazon announces SES email service

Last month Amazon announced a cloud based email service: Amazon SES. Amazon SES is an API based email service priced at a very low rate.
The SES product rounds out Amazon’s cloud hosting offerings. The Amazon cloud hosting service is great for webhosting but pretty bad for mail. A lot of ISPs refused to accept email from Amazon cloud IPs. But now cloud hosted customers, and others, can use the SES system to send mail.
It remains to be seen how the SES program works. They are using shared IPs for all customers. This means shared IP based reputation. As one of the major targets is transactional mail, something that normally has a very high engagement factor, it’s likely there will be a lot of good reputation on the SES IPs.
On the flip side, Amazon has set a very low price point and is allowing anyone to use their API. This is going to make it very attractive to some bad actors. These are the same folks who are attempting to compromise ESPs and sneak their mail through enforcement.
A lot of the delivery through the Amazon SES IPs is going to rely on enforcement. They seem to be putting a lot of stock in their content filtering being able to stop spam from getting through. That may or may not be enough; a lot of spammers are actually really good at avoiding content filters.
The good news is that Amazon seems to have considered a lot of these issues. They are providing a SPF record for the SES IPs, and have a way to accept DKIM signed email. They also have an experienced delivery person working there which will work in their favor.
It will be interesting to see if this works. I believe the success or failure will lie with Amazon. I know, I know, normally I say that a sender is responsible for their own reputation. But in a shared environment, it is the overall reputation of the senders that is the key to delivery. Amazon can drive that overall reputation by what customers they allow to send mail through the system. It will be interesting to see what happens in 6 – 12 months when they’ve had some time to build up a customer base.

Goodmail alternatives

A number of Goodmail customers are scrambling to identify alternatives now that Goodmail is shutting down. There are two companies in the field offering similar services.
Return Path offers Return Path Certified. A number of large ISPs accept Return Path certification, including Yahoo, Hotmail and Comcast. IP addresses that are certified are not guaranteed to reach the inbox, but there are some delivery benefits to being certified. For instance, Hotmail lifts hourly delivery limits for certified IPs. Return Path closely monitors certified IPs and will remove certification from IP addresses that do not meet their standards. They are offering an expedited application process and managed transition to former Goodmail customers.
SuretyMail offers accreditation to senders. SpamAssassin does use SuretyMail as a factor in their scores. Mail from accredited IPs receives lower SpamAssassin scores. I don’t have much direct experience with SuretyMail, so I can’t talk too knowledgeably about their processes. A former customer has written, however, about their experience with SuretyMail. They are offering a half off application fee for former Goodmail customers.
The other option for senders is to find a good delivery consultant. As I said yesterday, a large number of senders are not certified or accredited and experience 95+% inbox delivery rates. Many of my customers, for instance, see 100% inbox without certification. There are certain market segments where certification makes a difference. But for senders who are sending mail that users actually want to receive and are engaged with, certification isn’t always necessary.

Goodmail shutting down

Yesterday Goodmail sent out mail to all their customers announcing they are ceasing operations and taking all their token generators offline as of 5pm pacific on February 8th.
While this is a bit of a surprise on one level, I’m not that shocked. Ken Magill mentioned in August that Goodmail was on the sales block and rumors have been circulating for weeks about significant changes coming to Goodmail.
Goodmail has struggled to find a market since they first started. At one point they were even giving services away to customers at partner ESPs. Despite the free service, people at some of those ESPs told me they were having difficulty getting customers to adopt Goodmail.
Likewise, on the ISP side, Goodmail didn’t seem to have much penetration into the market. They had AOL, Yahoo and some cable companies, but not much else. And as of early last year, Yahoo removed the Goodmail machines.
I think the real underlying problem was that most companies who are doing things well don’t need certification services. Sure, there are a couple exceptions but in general anyone who is sending good mail is getting to the inbox. Even for companies where delivery was not quite as good as they might want, the marginal improvement at those ISPs that do use Goodmail was not sufficient to justify the cost of Goodmail services.
While I have the utmost respect for the Goodmail management team I think this result was almost inevitable. I never got the impression they valued the end recipient quite as much as the ISPs do. That was just one thing that lead me to believe they just didn’t seem to understand the email ecosystem quite the way that a certification service should.
I echo Dennis’ thoughts and well wishes towards the Goodmail folks. The experiment in sender financed delivery was well worth doing and I think they did it as well as anyone could have.

Plenty of Fish hack

There’s been a lot of press recently about the Plenty of Fish hack and their response to it.

Yes, we have no IP addresses, we have no addresses today

We’ve just about run out of the Internet equivalent of a natural resource – IP addresses.

How many people to enforce policy?

I’ve been head down working on a doc for a client and started wondering what the average size of an enforcement team is. This client told me during one of our calls they wanted to be as clean and well respected as another ESP, but was shocked when I told them how large an enforcement and delivery team that ESP maintained.
I know other clients of mine have 6 – 8 people for a very large customer base, and all of them take their job very seriously.
That got me to thinking: what is the average size of a policy and enforcement desk? Does it scale with userbase? Does it scale with the amount of mail you send? Is there a minimum size?
So tell me: how many people are on your policy and enforcement team?

Why is shared hosting like phishing?

A client of a friend was getting rejection messages when they tried to send mail

Groupon and science

And interesting reaction to a recent Groupon offer for spa services.

Change is required

I get a lot of calls from senders who tell me that they have not changed what they were doing, but all of a sudden their mail isn’t performing the way it used to. Sometimes it’s simply less effective marketing, but more often than not the issue is mail being blocked or filtered to the bulk folder.
What worked today won’t work tomorrow. Spammers are forever evolving new techniques to get past spam filters. ISPs are forever evolving new techniques to stop them.
One of the current driving forces for spam filter development is focused on the individual recipients. Recipient wants and needs are king in the world of ISP mail filtering. Much of that is driven by the underlying business models of the free ISPs. They are selling eyeballs to their advertisers and that relies on keeping as many eyeballs around for as long as possible.
An early version of the recipient driven filtering was “add to your address book” where individual users could over ride ISP delivery decisions by actively adding a From: address to their address book. The ISPs have been refining this over time. For instance, if you reply to an email in some clients, you are prompted to add that address to your address books. If you take an email out of your bulk folder and move it to your inbox then that address is automatically added to your address book.
But the refinements haven’t stopped there. ISPs are now making smart decisions about what emails a particular recipient will want to receive. This raises a number of challenges to senders. How do you send email to ten thousand or a hundred thousand or a million people and make it relevant to all of them?
Smart senders will take the individual delivery challenge in stride. They will change along with the ISPs, to send mail that their recipients want to receive. Change is inevitable and required.

Legal analysis of Hypertouch v. Valueclick

Venkat has an analysis of the Hypertouch v. Valueclick case and recent appeals court ruling.