Oh, come on. All Brad did was provide, in a humorous way, a warning that the link might not be entirely work-safe. He even pointed out that the nudity was *non-gratuitous*.
Did you even bother to check out the linked pages? He's not promoting an inaccurate view of the festival at all -- quite the opposite, in fact.
What you've just described is the same thing Atkins does.
Contrary to popular belief and some of the comments here, he doesn't tell people to go out and start wolfing down bacon, eggs, and red meat while they loll about on the couch. In fact, he strongly recommends fish and non-saturated fats in addition to (low carbohydrate density) veggies and exercise.
Bacon, eggs, and red meat are dietary options, not requirements, and he cautions about overdoing them.
Besides NavTech, there is also TeleAtlas (specifically, TeleAtlas North America, or TANA). I know TANA data is used by www.mapsonus.com, and there may be others.
I think NavTech has more market share in North America, and TeleAtlas has more in Europe, but couldn't swear to that.
My preferred site is www.mapsonus.com, which uses data from TeleAtlas North America (aka TANA, formerly Etak).
A few years ago, I was told by someone in the know that TANA tended to be more accurate in actually knowing where a given location was, while NavTech was better at turn-by-turn directions. No idea where MapQuest fits in (at the time, I thought they used NavTech).
IMHO, it's worth checking several sources to triangulate. Just check the fine print on the generated maps, to ensure that you're not looking at two presentations of the same data.
Alluded to in the article, but still worth repeating, is that this is a clear example of why anti-spam regulations should focus on unsolicited bulk email (UBE), not unsolicited commercial email (UCE).
The effect on the network is the same regardless of the content , whether it's commerical, political, religious, or whatever. Hence the catchphrase: "It's about consent, not about content".
Unfortunately, it's probably unrealistic to expect that politicians would ever pass laws limiting their own ability to spam. Any legislation that comes out of this will probably just be along the lines of "no forged headers" and "must support opt-out".
He's saying the employee opts in first, and then unsubscribes. That allows DoubleClick to verify that the unsubscribe process works properly, which is essential even if the opt-in process is done with verification.
Affirmative vs. negative action is a much less clear-cut issue. Personally, I'd say that "informed consent" is what's important. If the checkbox is obvious and the purpose is unmistakeable to the user (i.e., not hidden somewhere where you need to scroll to it, or buried in fine print, or using misleading language), then it really doesn't matter whether the box is checked by default or not.
Of course, it's typically safer to default to "don't send me email" as a matter of policy, just to avoid subjective arguments over whether the text is clear enough.
I'm not calling your credentials or your knowledge into question, just pointing out the problems based on my own experience for the benefit of others here.
1. Registration
Thanks for the explanation, though as someone else has pointed out, what you are describing is not a verified opt-in registration process. Perhaps I should have been more specific in that regard.
If DoubleClick is in fact registering seed addresses with their clients to monitor compliance, that's a good first step. Unfortunately, it doesn't ensure that email addresses the client obtained through an earlier version of their registration process are also opt-in.
One additional step they could take after checking out the current opt-in process would be to send an initial test mailing to a random sampling of the list. It's not ideal, but it will provide an early tipoff of problems while impacting a minimal number of users. I believe a similar tactic is used by whitehat.com.
2. Penalties
Two problems:
First, if you don't require reproducible proof of opt-in up front, then there really is no way to prove whether someone opted in. That's a hard standard, because it isn't always accurate to assume that the person complaining really got spammed (as I'm sure you know, even with a fully verified opt-in process, some people forget they opted in and complain anyway). About the only objective measure you can take at that point is establishing an arbitrary threshold of % complaints (which has it's own dangers: see MonsterHut/PaeTec).
Second, there need to be stiff financial penalties spelled out in the contract. Simply cancelling the contract effectively gives unscrupulous spammers "one bite of the apple" (though if the bite is expensive enough, this won't be an issue).
As for litigation, it's costly, distracting, and has an uncertain outcome. So it really isn't an effective deterrent against anything but the most egregious abuses. It's very unlikely to be used against large mainstream customers who, while they don't scrape web pages for addresses, are careless about verifying addresses or merging in data from (as a common example) product warranty registration cards.
3. Responsibility
The primary responsibility of any corporation is to its shareholders, but that's not the sort of responsibility I'm talking about.
Obviously, no product, be it a licensed solution that the customer installs and manages themselves, or a hosted solution managed by DoubleClick for it's customers, can ever absolutely prevent abuse. Bulk email software does not necessarily equal spamware (to qualify, it must support such things as header forging or address scraping). I don't think DARTmail is spamware.
If it's a licensed solution, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. The customer sends the email from their own servers, and if they screw up, they get the complaints, blackhole listings, and possible lawsuits.
A hosted solution such as DARTmail, however, is a different kettle of fish. If DoubleClick permits its own servers to be used for spam, then the internet community will hold them responsible, via RBL listings and the like. Just like an ISP that doesn't do anything about its spammers.
Further, if DoubleClick allows such spam knowingly, or fails to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable abuse, then there's the potential for it to wind up on the wrong side of civil litigation as well.
The problem for the rest of us is that because DoubleClick's first responsibility *is* to it's shareholders, it may well decide that the immediate revenue provided by marketers who use questionable lists outweighs the long-term costs associated with potential blackhole listings or lawsuits.
4. The stated point of DARTmail
I think we're nitpicking here, but I concede your point on the state purpose being "opt-in" email.
And I agree that standard email clients and small-scale providers can't cut it. 1.88M is just scratching the surface of what high-end needs are in this arena. I know of companies that send significantly more than that on a daily basis, all of which is truly opt-in.
5. Cost issues
As I said elsewhere, high cost will deter the fly-by-nights, but may not deter larger businesses with lists that aren't harvested, but aren't squeaky-clean either.
>It's a premium email delivery engine. >It is much too expensive for spammers.
There's no such thing. It may be too expensive for the fly-by-night porn and pyramid scammers, but not for big corporations like Microsoft, Real Networks, EBay, American Express, etcetera -- all of which have been guilty of spamming via "high-end" solutions.
And "single opt-in" isn't really opt-in. If you don't verify the address first, you don't know if the person who signed it up is the person the address belongs to. It's like failing to ask to see a picture ID when accepting a check for a large purchase.
If DoubleClick doesn't require that the customer be able to provide proof of opt-in verification, then they have no way to check whether or not it really was opt-in.
In cases like these, the customer's justification is almost always either "they did opt-in" or "oops, we made a technical error". It's just a question of whether the customer pays enough money to be worth the hassle of allowing them to continue spamming. At these prices, it usually will be, at least until DARTmail starts to wind up on the major block lists.
It's probably true that DARTmail isn't a spammer product in terms of scraping addresses, etc. But there's no purely technical way to prevent such a tool from being used for spamming, either. If DoubleClick hosts it, they're responsible for their customers' use or abuse of it.
The proof of the pudding, so to speak, will be seen in what steps DoubleClick takes to check in advance that a customer is using confirmed opt-in, and in how quickly DoubleClick boots spamming customers, if at all.
While it's true that not all email marketing is spam (if a verified opt-in procedure is used correctly, it's just fine), whether or not this is spam has nothing to do with the MessageMedia connection.
It's nigh on impossible to run a hosted email marketing service operation without having some customers use it for spam. Even Rodney Joffe's whitehat.com has been snookered once or twice, and they do it about as "right" as you can get.
MessageMedia themselves made it onto quite a few blacklists because they allowed their customers to spam through them. It doesn't matter whether the customer scraped email addresses off the web, or from their own product registration cards. If the recipient didn't opt-in to receive the marketing email, it's spam.
I'm afraid you're naive if you believe that, just as I once was.
How does DoubleClick verify that the lists in use are opt-in? And what penalties will they enforce if they aren't? If a DoubleClick customer spams via the DARTmail service, DoubleClick has just as much responsibility as an ISP does when one of it's customers starts spamming. Moreso, in fact, since bulk email is the stated point of the DARTmailservice.
As for the cost issues, there have been other companies who have charged (and continue to charge) a hefty price to act as an email marketing service provider. That didn't stop their customers from using it for spam.
How do I know? Because I've worked for an email service provider, and have seen it happen. Given DoubleClick's spotty history, there's no reason to think it won't happen with DARTmail.
This is actually a very _bad_ idea. Aside from the notion that it's inappropriate to fight abuse with abuse, some spammers forge return paths so that they point to real people.
Thus, your approach hits not only the spammers, but innocent bystanders as well.
If that's the entire process, then it is open for abuse, because there's no confirmation step, so MM has no way of knowing whether the person who entered that email address is the one who actually owns it.
This means that someone could sign you up without your permission. This might be deliberate and benign (your friend though you'd be interested), deliberate and malevolent (your enemy signs you up to hundreds of such unconfirmed lists to swamp you), or accidental (someone mistypes their user name or domain, and accidentally gets yours). The last happens to me all the friggin time, and there are those who are routinely signed up as a harassment technique.
The easy way to avoid this problem is simply to send a single email to the newly added address, asking the owner of that address to confirm (either by clicking a link or hitting reply). If they don't, you don't send them any more email, and the problem is solved. It's trivial, and any list management tool worth a damn can do it easily.
And it is, in fact, exactly what MAPS recommends. Check out http://www.mail-abuse.org/manage.html for details.
"Spamware" refers to tools designed to harvest email addresses from webpages/newsgroups, forge headers to avoid detection, rape open relays, etc.
It isn't just any tool that can send email.
> My understanding of the RBL is that if I
> subscribe to it, I will not receive e-mail
> from any sites listed on the RBL. Sites
> (supposedly) get listed on the RBL because
> they have been the direct source of
> spam mail.
Your understanding is wrong. MAPS isn't doing anything other than what they advertise.
"Spam support" services (including hosting websites selling spamware) is clearly listed as one of the things that will get a company listed on the RBL.
If you subscribe to the RBL, that's the policy you're subscribing to. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
Also, some mainsleaze spammers use a more insidious variation of dictionary attack, known as "email appending" or "e-pending". They take known user names from customers, and try variations of that name at various domains, i.e.:
...and so forth for a whole list of user names and domains. Really sucks for anyone set up to funnel all mail sent to their domain to one account.
The biggest problem with SugarPlum isn't that it isn't effective against dictionary attacks, though. The real problem is that it uses valid domains at all, meaning innocent people can get the collateral spam damage.
Were I an ISP, I'd consider use of SugarPlum to be a form of network abuse, and terminate any accounts caught using it.
To begin with, MAPS does not block anyone's email (except, perhaps, to their own servers). Other networks/ISPs may use MAPS' list to block email coming into *their* network from sites on the list, but that's well within their rights.
Further, MAPS doesn't go out and actively look for companies that don't meet their standards. The operate _only_ in response to well-documented complaints from users who either never opted in in the first place, or who did opt-in but who the company refused to allow to opt back out. And they always try to contact the alleged spammer, explain to them why what they are doing is wrong, and get them to change to more responsible list management practices. An RBL listing is a last resort, reserved for companies that absolutely refuse to clean up their acts.
Among other things, the companies in question appear to have gotten into trouble with MAPS either because they used a sleazy, non-obvious pre-checked opt-in box, or because they failed to confirm that email addresses they were given actually corresponded to people who wanted to opt-in.
After all, it is trivial to (accidentally or purposely) subscribe someone else's email address to an opt-in list on a company website -- it is up to the owner of that website to make sure the person who signed up actually has that email address.
Confirmation is trivial -- just send an email to that address with a web link for the user to click on or an email address to reply to, and you've proved who they are. End of problem.
This is actually of significant benefit to the savvy marketer. It allows them to eliminate bad addresses easily ("mickeymouse@nowhere.invalid"), and tends to produce a much higher response rate in subsequent marketing messages.
While in most cases any publicity can be good, Yesmail would be foolish to try this. Why? Because every ISP out there has the capability (and the right) to add Yesmail to their own private blackhole lists (not shared with anyone else; just preventing their own email servers from acception email from Yesmail, which is entirely within their rights). Yesmail will wind up on thousands of individual blacklists. Worse, because of the inertia of such lists, they'll never get back off all of them. It's already happening -- check out news.admin.net-abuse.email (NANAE). Precedent exists for this -- look at the history of AGIS, which was (for a time) a spam-friendly provider. They wound up on so many blacklists that they essentially became just a private network. They cleaned up their act, but could never get off enough private lists, and finally delared bankruptcy a while back. In a sense, MAPS was doing Yesmail a favor -- at least you can get back off the RBL.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on. All Brad did was provide, in a humorous way, a warning that the link might not be entirely work-safe. He even pointed out that the nudity was *non-gratuitous*.
Did you even bother to check out the linked pages? He's not promoting an inaccurate view of the festival at all -- quite the opposite, in fact.
"No Fishing From Bridge"
(seriously!)
What you've just described is the same thing Atkins does.
Contrary to popular belief and some of the comments here, he doesn't tell people to go out and start wolfing down bacon, eggs, and red meat while they loll about on the couch. In fact, he strongly recommends fish and non-saturated fats in addition to (low carbohydrate density) veggies and exercise.
Bacon, eggs, and red meat are dietary options, not requirements, and he cautions about overdoing them.
Not entirely the same.
Besides NavTech, there is also TeleAtlas (specifically, TeleAtlas North America, or TANA). I know TANA data is used by www.mapsonus.com, and there may be others.
I think NavTech has more market share in North America, and TeleAtlas has more in Europe, but couldn't swear to that.
That's typical of most sites, and usually refers to an entry/exit ramp.
My preferred site is www.mapsonus.com, which uses data from TeleAtlas North America (aka TANA, formerly Etak).
A few years ago, I was told by someone in the know that TANA tended to be more accurate in actually knowing where a given location was, while NavTech was better at turn-by-turn directions. No idea where MapQuest fits in (at the time, I thought they used NavTech).
IMHO, it's worth checking several sources to triangulate. Just check the fine print on the generated maps, to ensure that you're not looking at two presentations of the same data.
Alluded to in the article, but still worth repeating, is that this is a clear example of why anti-spam regulations should focus on unsolicited bulk email (UBE), not unsolicited commercial email (UCE).
The effect on the network is the same regardless of the content , whether it's commerical, political, religious, or whatever. Hence the catchphrase: "It's about consent, not about content".
Unfortunately, it's probably unrealistic to expect that politicians would ever pass laws limiting their own ability to spam. Any legislation that comes out of this will probably just be along the lines of "no forged headers" and "must support opt-out".
Sigh.
>I wonder what they mean by "thriving."
For true opt-in email, response rates of 10-15% or even higher are not unusual.
But even 0.1% wouldn't be considered bad, as it is comparable to traditional (snail-mail) direct marketing response rates, but at a much lower cost.
To be fair, that's not quite what he's saying.
He's saying the employee opts in first, and then unsubscribes. That allows DoubleClick to verify that the unsubscribe process works properly, which is essential even if the opt-in process is done with verification.
Affirmative vs. negative action is a much less clear-cut issue. Personally, I'd say that "informed consent" is what's important. If the checkbox is obvious and the purpose is unmistakeable to the user (i.e., not hidden somewhere where you need to scroll to it, or buried in fine print, or using misleading language), then it really doesn't matter whether the box is checked by default or not.
Of course, it's typically safer to default to "don't send me email" as a matter of policy, just to avoid subjective arguments over whether the text is clear enough.
I'm not calling your credentials or your knowledge into question, just pointing out the problems based on my own experience for the benefit of others here.
1. Registration
Thanks for the explanation, though as someone else has pointed out, what you are describing is not a verified opt-in registration process. Perhaps I should have been more specific in that regard.
If DoubleClick is in fact registering seed addresses with their clients to monitor compliance, that's a good first step. Unfortunately, it doesn't ensure that email addresses the client obtained through an earlier version of their registration process are also opt-in.
One additional step they could take after checking out the current opt-in process would be to send an initial test mailing to a random sampling of the list. It's not ideal, but it will provide an early tipoff of problems while impacting a minimal number of users. I believe a similar tactic is used by whitehat.com.
2. Penalties
Two problems:
First, if you don't require reproducible proof of opt-in up front, then there really is no way to prove whether someone opted in. That's a hard standard, because it isn't always accurate to assume that the person complaining really got spammed (as I'm sure you know, even with a fully verified opt-in process, some people forget they opted in and complain anyway). About the only objective measure you can take at that point is establishing an arbitrary threshold of % complaints (which has it's own dangers: see MonsterHut/PaeTec).
Second, there need to be stiff financial penalties spelled out in the contract. Simply cancelling the contract effectively gives unscrupulous spammers "one bite of the apple" (though if the bite is expensive enough, this won't be an issue).
As for litigation, it's costly, distracting, and has an uncertain outcome. So it really isn't an effective deterrent against anything but the most egregious abuses. It's very unlikely to be used against large mainstream customers who, while they don't scrape web pages for addresses, are careless about verifying addresses or merging in data from (as a common example) product warranty registration cards.
3. Responsibility
The primary responsibility of any corporation is to its shareholders, but that's not the sort of responsibility I'm talking about.
Obviously, no product, be it a licensed solution that the customer installs and manages themselves, or a hosted solution managed by DoubleClick for it's customers, can ever absolutely prevent abuse. Bulk email software does not necessarily equal spamware (to qualify, it must support such things as header forging or address scraping). I don't think DARTmail is spamware.
If it's a licensed solution, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. The customer sends the email from their own servers, and if they screw up, they get the complaints, blackhole listings, and possible lawsuits.
A hosted solution such as DARTmail, however, is a different kettle of fish. If DoubleClick permits its own servers to be used for spam, then the internet community will hold them responsible, via RBL listings and the like. Just like an ISP that doesn't do anything about its spammers.
Further, if DoubleClick allows such spam knowingly, or fails to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable abuse, then there's the potential for it to wind up on the wrong side of civil litigation as well.
The problem for the rest of us is that because DoubleClick's first responsibility *is* to it's shareholders, it may well decide that the immediate revenue provided by marketers who use questionable lists outweighs the long-term costs associated with potential blackhole listings or lawsuits.
4. The stated point of DARTmail
I think we're nitpicking here, but I concede your point on the state purpose being "opt-in" email.
And I agree that standard email clients and small-scale providers can't cut it. 1.88M is just scratching the surface of what high-end needs are in this arena. I know of companies that send significantly more than that on a daily basis, all of which is truly opt-in.
5. Cost issues
As I said elsewhere, high cost will deter the fly-by-nights, but may not deter larger businesses with lists that aren't harvested, but aren't squeaky-clean either.
>It's a premium email delivery engine.
>It is much too expensive for spammers.
There's no such thing. It may be too expensive for the fly-by-night porn and pyramid scammers, but not for big corporations like Microsoft, Real Networks, EBay, American Express, etcetera -- all of which have been guilty of spamming via "high-end" solutions.
And "single opt-in" isn't really opt-in. If you don't verify the address first, you don't know if the person who signed it up is the person the address belongs to. It's like failing to ask to see a picture ID when accepting a check for a large purchase.
If DoubleClick doesn't require that the customer be able to provide proof of opt-in verification, then they have no way to check whether or not it really was opt-in.
In cases like these, the customer's justification is almost always either "they did opt-in" or "oops, we made a technical error". It's just a question of whether the customer pays enough money to be worth the hassle of allowing them to continue spamming. At these prices, it usually will be, at least until DARTmail starts to wind up on the major block lists.
It's probably true that DARTmail isn't a spammer product in terms of scraping addresses, etc. But there's no purely technical way to prevent such a tool from being used for spamming, either. If DoubleClick hosts it, they're responsible for their customers' use or abuse of it.
The proof of the pudding, so to speak, will be seen in what steps DoubleClick takes to check in advance that a customer is using confirmed opt-in, and in how quickly DoubleClick boots spamming customers, if at all.
Frankly, I'm not optimistic.
While it's true that not all email marketing is spam (if a verified opt-in procedure is used correctly, it's just fine), whether or not this is spam has nothing to do with the MessageMedia connection.
It's nigh on impossible to run a hosted email marketing service operation without having some customers use it for spam. Even Rodney Joffe's whitehat.com has been snookered once or twice, and they do it about as "right" as you can get.
MessageMedia themselves made it onto quite a few blacklists because they allowed their customers to spam through them. It doesn't matter whether the customer scraped email addresses off the web, or from their own product registration cards. If the recipient didn't opt-in to receive the marketing email, it's spam.
I'm afraid you're naive if you believe that, just as I once was.
How does DoubleClick verify that the lists in use are opt-in? And what penalties will they enforce if they aren't? If a DoubleClick customer spams via the DARTmail service, DoubleClick has just as much responsibility as an ISP does when one of it's customers starts spamming. Moreso, in fact, since bulk email is the stated point of the DARTmailservice.
As for the cost issues, there have been other companies who have charged (and continue to charge) a hefty price to act as an email marketing service provider. That didn't stop their customers from using it for spam.
How do I know? Because I've worked for an email service provider, and have seen it happen. Given DoubleClick's spotty history, there's no reason to think it won't happen with DARTmail.
This is actually a very _bad_ idea. Aside from the notion that it's inappropriate to fight abuse with abuse, some spammers forge return paths so that they point to real people.
Thus, your approach hits not only the spammers, but innocent bystanders as well.
If that's the entire process, then it is open for abuse, because there's no confirmation step, so MM has no way of knowing whether the person who entered that email address is the one who actually owns it.
This means that someone could sign you up without your permission. This might be deliberate and benign (your friend though you'd be interested), deliberate and malevolent (your enemy signs you up to hundreds of such unconfirmed lists to swamp you), or accidental (someone mistypes their user name or domain, and accidentally gets yours). The last happens to me all the friggin time, and there are those who are routinely signed up as a harassment technique.
The easy way to avoid this problem is simply to send a single email to the newly added address, asking the owner of that address to confirm (either by clicking a link or hitting reply). If they don't, you don't send them any more email, and the problem is solved. It's trivial, and any list management tool worth a damn can do it easily.
And it is, in fact, exactly what MAPS recommends. Check out http://www.mail-abuse.org/manage.html for details.
"Spamware" refers to tools designed to harvest email addresses from webpages/newsgroups, forge headers to avoid detection, rape open relays, etc. It isn't just any tool that can send email.
> My understanding of the RBL is that if I
> subscribe to it, I will not receive e-mail
> from any sites listed on the RBL. Sites
> (supposedly) get listed on the RBL because
> they have been the direct source of
> spam mail.
Your understanding is wrong. MAPS isn't doing anything other than what they advertise.
"Spam support" services (including hosting websites selling spamware) is clearly listed as one of the things that will get a company listed on the RBL.
If you subscribe to the RBL, that's the policy you're subscribing to. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
Yep. Basically a dictionary attack.
...
Also, some mainsleaze spammers use a more insidious variation of dictionary attack, known as "email appending" or "e-pending". They take known user names from customers, and try variations of that name at various domains, i.e.:
johnsmith@.com
jsmith@.com
johns@.com
johnsmith@.com
...and so forth for a whole list of user names and domains. Really sucks for anyone set up to funnel all mail sent to their domain to one account.
The biggest problem with SugarPlum isn't that it isn't effective against dictionary attacks, though. The real problem is that it uses valid domains at all, meaning innocent people can get the collateral spam damage.
Were I an ISP, I'd consider use of SugarPlum to be a form of network abuse, and terminate any accounts caught using it.
Nope, you're dead wrong.
To begin with, MAPS does not block anyone's email (except, perhaps, to their own servers). Other networks/ISPs may use MAPS' list to block email coming into *their* network from sites on the list, but that's well within their rights.
Further, MAPS doesn't go out and actively look for companies that don't meet their standards. The operate _only_ in response to well-documented complaints from users who either never opted in in the first place, or who did opt-in but who the company refused to allow to opt back out. And they always try to contact the alleged spammer, explain to them why what they are doing is wrong, and get them to change to more responsible list management practices. An RBL listing is a last resort, reserved for companies that absolutely refuse to clean up their acts.
Among other things, the companies in question appear to have gotten into trouble with MAPS either because they used a sleazy, non-obvious pre-checked opt-in box, or because they failed to confirm that email addresses they were given actually corresponded to people who wanted to opt-in.
After all, it is trivial to (accidentally or purposely) subscribe someone else's email address to an opt-in list on a company website -- it is up to the owner of that website to make sure the person who signed up actually has that email address.
Confirmation is trivial -- just send an email to that address with a web link for the user to click on or an email address to reply to, and you've proved who they are. End of problem.
This is actually of significant benefit to the savvy marketer. It allows them to eliminate bad addresses easily ("mickeymouse@nowhere.invalid"), and tends to produce a much higher response rate in subsequent marketing messages.
If you're going to complain, at least complain about the right organization.
MAPS is *not* blocking ORBS
Above.net *is* blocking ORBS
While it is true that some of the principals at both organizations are the same, it does not follow that MAPS == Above.net.
Horrible idea.
What would happen is that offshore or simply elusive spammers would use this list as another source of confirmed addresses, and send to it anyway.
While in most cases any publicity can be good, Yesmail would be foolish to try this. Why? Because every ISP out there has the capability (and the right) to add Yesmail to their own private blackhole lists (not shared with anyone else; just preventing their own email servers from acception email from Yesmail, which is entirely within their rights). Yesmail will wind up on thousands of individual blacklists. Worse, because of the inertia of such lists, they'll never get back off all of them. It's already happening -- check out news.admin.net-abuse.email (NANAE). Precedent exists for this -- look at the history of AGIS, which was (for a time) a spam-friendly provider. They wound up on so many blacklists that they essentially became just a private network. They cleaned up their act, but could never get off enough private lists, and finally delared bankruptcy a while back. In a sense, MAPS was doing Yesmail a favor -- at least you can get back off the RBL.