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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."
Get a hold of the whitelist, and you can immediately add it to your OWN spam filter! Nice of Microsoft to offer to collect all, umm, marketers in one place...
And then they will charge users extra for "adv free" service. Oh wait, I thought they were talking about phone companies.
Yahoo has been doing this for a LONG time.
they have their "spam" filtering yet there are types of spam that will not go away as they have "special" spam from their "partners" that will NEVER EVER hit their filtering rules for spam.
I am betting that ALL free email sites will do this within this year.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
My company was informed of this bonded sender program by MSN/Hotmail support 2 months ago. At the time they claimed the Bonded Sender program was a third-party service with no affiliation to MSN/Hotmail or Microsoft. At the same time, they also claimed that even if you DO subscribe to the bonded sender program MSN/Hotmail will give no guarantee that your emails will be delivered!
allow legitimate marketers to thread the gauntlet of spam filters
- run the gauntlet
- thread the needle
choose one.D.
Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't.
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
The original poster assumed that Microsoft is opening the door to spammers. What is unsaid in the article is if these e-mails were actually solicited.
I could see that legit ads (i.e. you definitely signed up to recieve them) might be tossed out with the huge amount of spam. What Microsoft *might* be doing here is saying "OK, you say you are opt-in, we'll let your stuff through, but we're gonna take a bite out of you if you are lying to us."
Unfortunately, the author of the article didn't bother to state exactly what the rules are that Microsoft is imposing. Roast the journalist, not Microsoft (at least, not yet).
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====