bulk email

Mon Apr 22 20:53:35 UTC 2002

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 11:53:58AM +0100, James Cronin wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm working on a bulk (opt in!) email delivery system at the moment,
> and over the years I've heard a number of possibly apocryphal
> stories about people requiring contracts with large email suppliers
> (Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc..) in order to be able to guarantee
> delivery and lower the risk of email that's been requested by an
> end user being mistakenly blackholed or treated as spam by their
> ISP (or webmail provider).
> 
> Has anyone ever actually come across such a contract in real life
> or are they just urban myths?

The contracts... for most of them are urban myth. Perhaps not for all, and
since my NDA has now expired, I can say publically that I was involved with
Earthlink (just after the Mindspring merger) considering whether they would
need this sort of contract in some circumstances (and, more directly what
I was involved with, the inverse - contracts for bulk suppliers who were
not spammers, laying out what they needed to do to not get smacked with the
AUP).

I have also, recently, had problems with BellSouth's servers rejecting
legitimate mailing list emails to at least one user; it is not clear
whether the volume is the cause, but since the server in question isn't on
any of the open-relay lists, and is getting a 550 "anti-spam"ish error
message, while other servers can reach the same user perfectly well...

(Note: the lists in question follow all of the relevant RFCs, including
those for List-Id headers, Precedence headers, etc.)
-- 
***************************************************************************
Joel Baker                           System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer at lightbearer.com              http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/