A commenter asked me:
What do you expect me to start a complaint with, then? really ...what is wrong with "We are a legitimate business, we do not send spam!"?
There's nothing inherently wrong with "We are a legitimate business, we do not send spam!" - but every single business that sends email says they're legitimate, whether their mail stream generates massive complaints and a poor IP reputation, or not. The immediate "We're legitimate!" is a red flag in the same way "Officer, I wasn't doing anything wrong!" is. Starting off the conversation by protesting your innocence when you don't know what precipitated the stop (or worse, when you do know) can only lead to heartache, and a big pain in your wallet.
As an ISP abuse desk rider, I can tell you that sender claims of legitimacy, explanations of business models, assertions of opt-in, of CAN-SPAM compliance, and of observance of best practices are not actually relevant to the situation - what I care about is the response that the email streams get from my users. The reputation systems don't pay any attention to business models. They pay attention to results.
What does "a legitimate business" even mean in this context? That it has a brick and mortar address somewhere? That it sells genuine products and isn't a scam? That they don't buy email lists? It could mean anything, and often means nothing.
What "legitimate" means to me is "Does this IP have a good reputation? Do the recipients of this email really want it? Is it relevant and desired? Does it have an engaged audience? If this IP is new, has the sender followed best practices in terms of warm up and feedback loop set-up?"
If someone is opening a support request because their marketing mail is not getting through, the answers to those questions are probably "no", for whatever reason. There will be occasions where the failure of email to get delivered is a technical problem on the ISP end, but on the whole those aren't very common.
So, to more directly answer the question that was asked of me, when opening a support request I would skip any explanation of your business model, legitimacy, opt-in, etc, and get right to the heart of the matter - "My email is not being delivered, here's the IP, here's the error message, this is what we have done to clean up the problem. Thanks for your time."
...and if it's a reputation driven error/tempfail you're getting, don't open a ticket at all. Fix the underlying problem and the delivery issue will go away.
Rancid Slime and Email Marketing
2 days ago
Thank you for the reply, you can't imagine how useful it is to know what abuse stuff expects as explanation. I think you know how most of the postamster faq and guides published by ISP/ESP look. Useless.
Though I'd still have to mention, that it is good when you deal with some sender that has a clue about how it works. Like me :)
another story is what happens when a clueless person starts having problems. A client of mine has changed his IP address a couple of month ago. His old IP had a good reputation because (it is a legitimate newsletter?) he was sending to real opt-in subscribers the content they wanted to see. Needless to explain why he has called me next day after he issued the regular newsletter. He was actually terrified by what has happen. And obviously his first phrase was "Why did they do that? I run a legitimate business".
My point is that the system is broken. And (conspiracy theories apart) we (sender and receiver) have to invent some better practice to avoid such situations. I hope the community can get to some constructive solution. At least more constructive then it was before and it is now. Are you sure that in IPv6 world you will still be able to count reputation on the fact if I am a so called "dial up user"? Whay at all I can't have my own mail server at home and send directly? Nothing to do with IP reputation but just adds to the whole picture. Something is broken. A friend of main had business mail blackholed by ESP because it contained "$200,000" when he wrote it in letters the email has got to inbox.
With all of that said.... I understand what you say, been myself in ISP abuse and also heard a lot of lies intentional or not. but... some you know... human touch? Otherwise it is matrix :)
best wishes for you and happy twenty ten!
Oh, yeah, the system is definitely broken. The problem is that it's broken all the way back to the beginning - SMTP was never meant for this. It was designed for a web of trust, not a web of evil, and it's too late to go back and re-design it. All we can do at this point is patch and pray, and deal with the fall out - much like everyone using Windows, which is broken from birth.
Why you can't have your own mail server on a dialup IP - well you know why! Too many people abused the privilege and ruined it for the rest of us. I've written a couple of posts about how the net is broken and what it means for the whitehats, and to sum up - it means nothing good.
As far as human touch is concerned, I can't speak for any other ISPs, but AOL to date has tried very hard to keep a human touch involved, despite the staggeringly huge amount of email thrown at us every day. It's getting harder and harder to do that, though, for a number of reasons from increasing mail volume to staff cuts.
If you have ideas on how to fix the system, let's hear them! I don't mean that in any way sarcastically, either. I don't have the answers. I'd be really interested to know what other people think they could be. It's a scary situation out there.
@gfdsa - ueh, ma chi sei?
ok, really happy we agree it doesn't work :)
in che senso chi sono? http://gfdsa.gfdsa.org , http://michael.tabolsky.com , puoi cancellare il commento se viene considerato come pubblicità :)
La combinazione del tuo inglese, il tuo nome, e "Arese" mi hanno perplessa. Avendo visto il tuo sito adesso capisco. Hai fatto una vita interessante :)
Evviva l'internet! Piacere conoscerti!
eh si ... un po dei giri ho fatto :) sulle lingue devo lavorare se trovo tempo, il misto di 5 lingue crea un po di problemi stilistiche e grammatiche...
il piacere e' tutto mio!
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