[IP] AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Robert Grosshandler" <rob@iGive.com>
Date: September 15, 2007 2:30:49 PM EDT
To: <dave@farber.net>
Subject: RE: [IP] AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of  
Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf

Reputation isn’t “political or social reputation” when used in this  
particular context. It refers to the opinions of the receivers’  
customers (the e-mail recipient, Hotmail and AOL’s customers) as the  
“goodness” or “wantedness” of the sender’s missives.

We fight this battle every day.  AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail / MSN are in  
a league of their own when it comes to policing incoming e-mails, due  
to the size of their customer bases.  If a “lot” of their customers  
tell them that they are receiving unwanted e-mail from a sender, that  
sender’s reputation suffers.  If a sender utilizes IP addresses that  
are used to send some other sender’s unwanted e-mail, the sender’s  
reputation suffers.  If a sender sends too much e-mail all at once,  
the sender’s reputation suffers.  If the sender has “unclean” lists,  
with lots of bounces, their reputation suffers.  And so on.

We see very little reputation scoring based upon the content of e-mail.

The solution to Truthout’s problems are probably not political, but  
mechanical.  Each ISP has their own mechanisms for reputation  
monitoring and compliance, and they’re sometimes challenging (we have  
problems right now with Centurytel and Barracuda Networks.)  But I  
would dare to guess that so long as they don’t comply with those  
established, published mechanisms, they’ll be frustrated in their  
efforts.

If they are able to say that they’ve jumped through those e-mail  
reputation hoops, and that their bounce rate is low, and that their  
spam complaint rate is low, and that they handle unsubscribes in a  
timely fashion, and they’re still being blocked, THEN the political  
avenue may be the best route to take.

AOL:  http://postmaster.aol.com/
MSN/Hotmail:  https://postmaster.live.com/

Rob

www.iGive.com
Turn your shopping into philanthropy.

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