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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?"
We have that problem here from time to time, and the way we solve it is by actually calling up or e-mailing the ISP explaining the situation. Usually they're helpful and will give you directions on how to prevent further blacklisting.
Is Hotmail blacklisting (ie, he can't send even one email there), or is it just balking at the 600 addresses in the cc or bcc list? Many ISP's see such bulk mails as spam, and block them. The solution is simple: send them out in batches of twenty. There are many mail management applications that will do this for you. I ran into this problem myself, and turned Mailgust for batched sending. -Michael Greer
Find out why, and fix each thing that comes up. Maybe his mailserver has no reverse DNS, fix that. Maybe his ISP or his IP is on a blacklist, get it fixed or take his business elsewhere. Maybe subscribe to a service that handles email marketing responsibly, like (gasp) Microsoft's bCentral, they will make sure that they don't get blacklisted.
My company's emais were being dumped into the spam folder on Yahoo! Getting our email out of the Bulkmail folder was a lengthy process that took several attempts to start. I had to submit sample copies of our standard emails, and a copy of our privacy policy, and a rather lengthy survey. They reviewed the information, put us on probation, and reviewed the findings at the end of a month. My company is legit. I had no doubt that they would back our company off the blacklist. Incidently, the only way I found the proper channel to report the problem was to contact corporate HQ. Some deep digging was done and I finally ended up with an email address to report to: mail-abuse-bulk@yahoo-inc.com
Our system uses e-mail to notify customers of status changes. For a while, AOL decided that we were spammers, althought that has just as mysteriously subsided. We have had intermittent problems across the board... in part because our messages meet a lot of the standard patterns for spam: includes links, unique identifiers (account numbers), etc. We have tweaked them over time to be less likely to be mistaken for spam, but nothing we do seems to make it perfect.
To get around these problems, we have basically had to implement a private communication system in our product so people see notifications when the log in. For frequent users, this works well enough they can turn of the e-mail notifiers, but for very occasional users, having to log in to see notifications takes a lot away from the ease of use.
Frankly, I don't see a great fix anytime soon: the spammers have taken to copying legitimate e-mail messages into "hidden" text, while the actual spam is delivered via CSS and Image tricks...the battle rages, probably for at least the next ten years (at which point I'm hoping that public key cryptography will allow people to prove they are actually who they say they are) which is why we created a backup communication channel.
Sig under construction since 1998.