I'm working on a bulk (opt in!) email delivery system at the moment,
and over the years I've heard a number of possibly apocryphal
stories about people requiring contracts with large email suppliers
(Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc..) in order to be able to guarantee
delivery and lower the risk of email that's been requested by an
end user being mistakenly blackholed or treated as spam by their
ISP (or webmail provider).
Has anyone ever actually come across such a contract in real life
or are they just urban myths?
Has anyone ever actually come across such a contract in real life
or are they just urban myths?
Urban myth.
If you make damn sure that you clearly mark your bulk mail with the
website/organisation at which your user subscibed, & you record the
*way* they subscribed[0], you should be fine. It's also vitally
important that you respond promptly to email that arrives at your
domain's 'abuse@' address.
[0] Eg: IP address & time stamp from when they hit the 'subscribe me'
button on a web form, copy of the signed paper form they sent in, etc.
Unless the network is lying to me again, James Cronin said:
I'm working on a bulk (opt in!) email delivery system at the moment,
and over the years I've heard a number of possibly apocryphal
stories about people requiring contracts with large email suppliers
(Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc..) in order to be able to guarantee
delivery and lower the risk of email that's been requested by an
end user being mistakenly blackholed or treated as spam by their
ISP (or webmail provider).
Has anyone ever actually come across such a contract in real life
or are they just urban myths?
[opt-in bulk email]
>Has anyone ever actually come across such a contract in real life
>or are they just urban myths?
Urban myth.
If you make damn sure that you clearly mark your bulk mail with the
website/organisation at which your user subscibed, & you record the
*way* they subscribed[0], you should be fine. It's also vitally
important that you respond promptly to email that arrives at your
domain's 'abuse@' address.
[0] Eg: IP address & time stamp from when they hit the 'subscribe me'
button on a web form, copy of the signed paper form they sent in, etc.
AND send a verification email with a clearly marked confirmation
url that they must hit to actually be subscribed. Without successful
confirmation, no further email should be sent.
The contracts... for most of them are urban myth. Perhaps not for all, and
since my NDA has now expired, I can say publically that I was involved with
Earthlink (just after the Mindspring merger) considering whether they would
need this sort of contract in some circumstances (and, more directly what
I was involved with, the inverse - contracts for bulk suppliers who were
not spammers, laying out what they needed to do to not get smacked with the
AUP).
I have also, recently, had problems with BellSouth's servers rejecting
legitimate mailing list emails to at least one user; it is not clear
whether the volume is the cause, but since the server in question isn't on
any of the open-relay lists, and is getting a 550 "anti-spam"ish error
message, while other servers can reach the same user perfectly well...
(Note: the lists in question follow all of the relevant RFCs, including
those for List-Id headers, Precedence headers, etc.)
I have also, recently, had problems with BellSouth's
servers rejecting
legitimate mailing list emails to at least one user; it is not clear
whether the volume is the cause, but since the server in
question isn't on
any of the open-relay lists, and is getting a 550
"anti-spam"ish error
message, while other servers can reach the same user
perfectly well...
(Note: the lists in question follow all of the relevant
RFCs, including
those for List-Id headers, Precedence headers, etc.)
fwiw, i already asked joel in private email to provide me with more
details so that somebody can begin trying to figure out what happened.
seems something's obviously wrong here.
if anyone else has add'l info or similiar experiences, please shoot an
email off list to me.
I'm working on a bulk (opt in!) email delivery system at the moment,
and over the years I've heard a number of possibly apocryphal
stories about people requiring contracts with large email suppliers
(Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc..) in order to be able to guarantee
delivery and lower the risk of email that's been requested by an
end user being mistakenly blackholed or treated as spam by their
ISP (or webmail provider).