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ISPs Starting To Charge for 'Guaranteed' Email Delivery
Presto Vivace writes "Under the guise of fighting spam, five of the largest Internet service providers in the U.S. plan to start charging businesses for guaranteed delivery of their e-mails. In other words, with regular service we may or may not deliver your email. If you want it delivered, you will have to pay deluxe. 'According to Goodmail, seven U.S. ISPs now use CertifedEmail, accounting for 60 percent of the U.S. population. Goodmail--which takes up to 50 percent of the revenue generated by the plan--will for now approve only mail sent by companies and organizations that have been operational for a year or more. Ordinary users can still apply to be white-listed by individual ISPs, which effectively provides the same trusted status.'"
No, you are really wrong.
The point behind guaranteed delivery is that the ISP will not blacklist your domain/ip address regardless of how many spam reports they receive. This is the whole point behind goodmail.
I just spend hours in a meeting discussing this very topic. Our company was blacklisted by AOL because too many people reported our email as spam (it's all mail that they opted in for -- default is out). The result was all of AOL delivery was blacklisted. Eventually we got it fixed, but the next tier to the solution is to pay GoodMail $$ to effectively certify our domains as legitimate senders and they pay AOL a portion of their proceeds to guarantee permanent whitelist status no matter what the users do.
The only criteria that AOL has leveled against us is if someone tags our email as spam, we have to remove them from the mailing list. But I don't know if this will change or not with the introduction of GoodMail into our mail delivery system.
OK- so you've got the infrastructure to do pay-by-email set up. Now the end user has something like an iTunes account backed by paypal and it just sort of automagically charges your account every time you send an email, what happens when your machine is compromised by a bot-net and you're sending millions of emails for a quarter?
One word: Hashcash. Basically you prove that you wasted a couple seconds worth of CPU to send your message. I believe SpamAssassin already recognizes Hashcash headers, not sure about other filters. But if you're really ready to start dropping email en masse in favor of a whitelist-style approach, this is the simple and elegant solution.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
If you're running an MTA on a cheap connection you need to use your ISP's smarthost, mail that appears to come from dynamic addresses is increasingly rejected due to zombies.
Matching forward & reverse DNS (and sometimes helo) is an additional requirement for delivery to certain servers.
I work for a major corporation and assist with the email policy.
;)
For AOL, they required only two things from us, and we haven't run into problems:
1) Publish an SPF record (they were pushing it big-time). I'd recommend a loose policy that states "if it doesn't pass the SPF check, make your own decision" (which is the ?all option).
2) Establish a complaint/opt-out email box and process the messages that come from AOL.
Of course, there are vultures out there looking to make a buck by selling everyone a solution that is of questionable effectiveness.
We've resisted paying the "marketing tax" and haven't seen a drop-off in deliverability.
If more businesses refuse, then this trend will die off.
I hope it goes the same way as the "linux license" that a business could purchase from the SCO; let it be known to be tantamount to extortion!
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
- Relay through your providers smarthost
- Get a static IP
- Get a VPS and relay through that
It sucks much less than expecting receivers to accept spam.Your personal incredulity is not a rebuttal. I actually developed and run a site where each user pays us close to two thousand US dollars per year to receive our email updates, and some users on AOL still mark our messages as SPAM. About every six months or so, delivery to AOL email just gets blocked wholesale, and they aren't the friendliest people to deal with.
And we give the users many ways to opt in or out as they choose. They can even call or email customer service and we have a girl who will set up their account preferences for them -- so that each specific type of message, product category, or messages related to certain businesses, are excluded. And they still mark it as SPAM. I'm not sure if it's a penny-per-four emails problem, but it is certainly a problem.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.