What Happens when Legit Services are Seen as Spam?

AssFace asks: "I run a blog that is dedicated to just things relating to spam (for the most part, the discussion is of how to stop it). I received an e-mail from a reader of the blog today that described the situation he was in. His words: 'I have a small recruiting business, with about 600 paying clients who are looking for jobs in education. About twice a month, I send an update message to all of them via e-mail. I also send them personal messages as needed. Unfortunately, Hotmail (which a great many of my clients use) seems to think that I am a spammer. With Hotmail's spam blocker set on "Medium," my e-mails go to the recipient's Spam folder. AOL and Yahoo may be blocking my messages as well, though I'm not yet certain.' I wrote my own thoughts on it and then offered it up to comments from the users of the site. My responses to his e-mail apparently weren't anything that could help his particular situation. So, regardless of the validity of this particular person's plea, what is a small business service to do if they are blocked by the major ISPs?"

Comments

Whitelists

[brunson]

Do those services support whitelisting his address?

Whitelisting and education

[squiggleslash]

I've found that Yahoo's spam filters routinely block friends of mine - they'll forward me a joke, and because that joke is doing the rounds, it'll be treated as spam by default.

So, basically, I have to do two things. First, I never just blanket-empty my Bulk folder. Second, when I find someone being put in Bulk, I add a "rule" that automatically moves email from them into my Inbox. Unfortunately Yahoo doesn't document that this is what you need to do, so less experienced users wouldn't use this as a solution, if they knew how to do it at all.

I say whitelisting and education in my Subject line, the second is important. I try to persuade people to send email to my home address (which has an effective, no false positives, system enabled, based upon allocating every entity who wants to do business with me a unique, deletable, email address. No, before anyone responds, this isn't like the service that provides you with throwaway email addresses, that's a dumb idea that's likely to just end up with your domain blocked, I want legitimate businesses to be able to do business with me, and do so often on a long-term basis, I'm not trying to scam anyone) if the email absolutely does not have to be read by me at work.

More importantly, people have to realise that most filter-based systems, be they dumb like SPEWS or "learning" like Bayesian systems, carry the risk of blocking legitimate emails - SPEWS type systems are especially bad because their definition of "guilty" includes "being a customer of an ISP that also has a spammer as a customer" and there are anti-spam blacklists that have entire countries listed. The blacklist technologies are a kind of lynch-mob justice, they feed people's lust for revenge, but they ultimately seem to cause more problems than most. The non-blacklist filters, such as Bayesian, are better and not endowed with such a legacy, but they still carry some risk.

The point ultimately is that people need to know that anti-spam systems do not just block spam. You should devote a day a week going through your "marked as spam" messages if your email is important to you - most of the time it's a five minute job anyway, if my experience with Yahoo's bulk mail folder is anything to go by. It's not like you have to read anything more than the names and subjects for the most part.

Re:Is he actually being blacklisted?

[Frizzle Fry]

I don't think they're that stupid. If they see you sending identical emails to lots of people, they block it, even if they come in separate batches. Otherwise it would be too easy for spammers to do the same thing (I guess the first batch or two might get through). Even if this works for now, it seems likely that this could stop working at any time, so I would much perfer a real solution (like talking to hotmail and showing them what you're sending, or having users whitelist you if possible) to trying to hack around their spam filter in the same way that spammers do.

Re:Rule: No AOL or Hotmail.

[dyefade]

...you will not take anyone as a client unless they...
He's running a small business. For a massive company like Amazon or eBay, yes, this is an ideal solution, but he shouldn't be forced to alienate clients because of their choice of email provider/ISP.
This should be an extreme last resort!

Use Powweb: 650 free email accounts.

[Futurepower(R)]

I should have mentioned not to use Yahoo, also. Yahoo has shown itself to be very adversarial also, with its tricky practices opting users into receiving ads.

He could give free email accounts using Powweb as a web host. (650 email accounts allowed for $7.77 per month.) Powweb seems to be the best web hosting provider. Since all the mail would be coming from and going to his own domain, it can't be blocked. Isn't that a complete solution?

He could provide instructions to prospective customers about how to configure a new account in each of several email clients. He could tell them to use only their new account to communicate with him. Since the email activity would be only Powweb moving messages from one of their computers to another, there is unlikely to be any loss. (It's easy for a customer to know if he didn't successfully transmit a message to the Powweb ISP, because he will get an immediate error message.)

Re:Use Powweb: 650 free email accounts.

[RevDobbs]

First, that "solution" forces his clients to check another email account. Major PITA (?) .

Second, while PowWeb provides good web hosting for $7.77 a month, bear in mind that you get what you pay for, and that I have been less-than-happy with some randomly introduced email issues.

Re:Blacklist the blacklisters

[punkki]

My employer (a university) routinely ends up on blacklists because of students/departments/whatever that don't patch their machines and end up being used as relays.

So, your staff makes a mistake, somebody notices and enters the IP in a blocklist. Suddenly _blocklist operators_ are a*holes? Hmm. What an interesting world you're living in.

Answer: You don't.

[Otto]

Look, if you could get your message into my inbox by actions that you could take, then the SPAM filter has *failed* and would need adjustment.

The idea is to filter out things that look like spam. And I'm sorry, but what you say you're sending sounds like a lot of the spam I get, so it rightly should get filed as Junk.

That's not to say that it is, indeed, spam, if it's a pay for it sort of list. But the thing is that no email service deletes spam by default. If your message are getting foldered off somewhere, then it's up to the users to whitelist you and let your emails appear in their inbox instead of getting junkfiled. All of these free mail services have such capabilities.

But I would certainly hope that there would be nothing the sender of the email could do that would move his mail from my junk folder to my inbox. If they can, then the spam detection needs to be fixed. See the idea here?