Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Will Sell Whitelist Services For Hotmail
Ec|ipse writes "Looks like Microsoft has found another way to make money, this time from spam. Microsoft has adopted a "whitelist" program (Bonded Sender by IronPort) which will allow marketers to pay Microsoft so that they are included on a special whitelist, guaranteeing uninteruptable delivery of their messages to Hotmail and MSN users. You can catch the full article at Excite. I especially like the nice naming for spammers, calling them 'marketers' sounds so much more legitimate."
mgibbs adds "Hopefully the $20K fine that results from abuse of this system is enough to deter spammers."
I'd accept all the spam in the world if they paid me 15 cents per message. That would make spam much cheaper than bulk mail and would weed out marketers who aren't serious.
If a company is going to sell my resources (time spent downloading/reading/procesing email) they had better share the revenues with me.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I am an engineer in charge of a large email system. We send millions of emails per week to our members. I have contacts in the top 10 ISP's and we're on no RBL's of consequence (the big 10 RBL's are clean, we are not concerned about the RBL run by sn0rky in his dorm room). Rarely do we have a delivery problem, however we did decide to get Bonded since it looks like a good program for responsible mailers.
The BondedSender process looked us over and saw that we had, *gasp*, 50 complaints with a volume of 20 million messages sent. One complaint per million is their threshold for acceptance into the program! This is unreasonable. People complain about messages from their own damn family in my experience. The geeks here wont understand because they are literate of the issues surrounding the politics of email... but your average citizen is going to flip out and start whacking the "report as spam" button for anything they don't want to receive: their buddy sending them a dirty joke they don't want, an alert from their bank about their account being low, mailings from their girlfriend breaking up with them, etc.
This is absolutely true. I've heard the horror stories from my contacts at the aforementioned top 10 ISP's. The number of complaints they get about private emailings to and from their own contact lists rivals the number of messages that are actually spam.
I have an associate that works at large-bank-corp and they get about 1 per 10,000 complaints for their goddamn credit card statements!
BondedSender will be short lived unless they relax their restrictions. Any spammer sending pr0n and v|agra mailings is going to not be interested in this deal simply because of the costs and hassle of getting bonded. It's cheaper for Ma Bulker to just switch ISP's every two weeks or scam open relays.
Anyway... that's my say... Good luck if you try getting Bonded.
However, that makes my email address less useful, and Usenet a less useful resource.
I've never disguised my email address on Usenet or anywhere else (with the exception of some of the more pointless web site registrations). There have been plenty of times I've gone back to ancient archives digging for answers, come across someone who solved almost what I'm trying to do, and sent them an email asking if they'd mind helping me. And the converse has happened too - many people I don't know have emailed me over the years after coming across old posts, and I've helped out where possible.
I'm pretty defiant over this one. I refuse let low-life scum dictate how I can use my address. I am not going to jump through hoops at their behest - my email address is a contact point, and people should be able to use it to contact me.
Cheers,
Ian
My $0.02 worth! The more you tighten your grip, Gates, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. -Princess Leia (modified)
My old employer (a web-hosting company which shall remain nameless) did almost the same a few years ago. They hosted hundreds of "marketers" (yes, we used the same euphemism), who spammed like crazy from our boxes, then they turned around and sold spam filtering services to their other clients. Nice to profit off the problem you helped create.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
I read thru BondedSender's terms of service. Their allowed complaint rate is 1 per 1,000,000 messages sent. Each complaint over that limit deducts $20 from the sender's bond.
As someone that does legitimate commercial mailings (opt-in, for our MMORPG, about 15,000 messages per month to current and past players), this strikes me as slightly expensive, and somewhat dangerous. Some math...
Typically I get about 10 angry letters per newsletter, so that's $200 to send each newsletter. A cost of 1.3 cents per email isn't bad, since I know that most people read what I send.
Two problems. First, most newsletters go through now. Maybe 10% get spam filtered (I should probably set up a way to track this). So reaching those additional people costs 13 cents each. That is expensive.
Second, I worry that if the system becomes well known, it would be griefed: A single player with a bone to pick would sign up under a bunch of email addresses and "complain" from each. I'm not sure how to resolve this.
We've been used to it since 1976: An Open Letter to Hobbyists.
Except that IronPort, not Microsoft, is running this list. IronPort are the same people who purchased SpamCop. IronPort's business is SPAM prevention.
There are plenty of legitimate companies that don't SPAM that have IronPort bonds. Especially where these companies are sending out 'Technical Errata' or trying to run product support over E-mail.
Now you can argue that 'Technical Errata' sometimes has embedded ads (usually not), and sometimes is unsolicited (usually not) - but most people who ask for it think it's useful. If I send a company an Email asking them about how to fix thier broken product, I surely wouldn't want the reply to be stuck in a SPAM filter (this happens to me once or twice a month).
If you want to use IronPort's whitelist service, inquire at thier web site.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Actually, you don't get anything. The bond is posted by the marketer and is put in escrow. Everytime an infraction is reported you (as the marketer) are fined a relatively insignificant amount against the bond in escrow. This way, should the marketer send out a million emails and get 10 complaints, the "fine" is insignificant. If a marketer sends out a million emails and gets a hundred thousand complaints, their bond is consumed by the multitude of tiny fines and they are no longer bonded.
IronPort's receiver service page.
If you are interested in the rules that bonded senders have to ablige to:
IronPort's sender standards page.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
can i use this "whitelist" as a "blacklist" it seems a handy thing to have a list of self confessed spammers
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
If you have a hotmail account, you already know you can't block or filter to the trash any email from "staff@hotmail.com". It just isn't allowed. Of course, if you're like me, you only have the hotmail account for registering and you know it will only ever have spam, therefore you have everything go to the junk mail folder which will empty automatically. Only pitfall is I have to access it about once a month to prove it is "active".
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)