[47018] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: bulk email
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joel Baker)
Mon Apr 22 16:53:59 2002
From: "Joel Baker" <lucifer@lightbearer.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 14:53:35 -0600
To: nanog@merit.edu
Message-ID: <20020422145335.A4742@lightbearer.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <20020422105358.GK988@plum.flirble.org>; from james@unfortu.net on Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 11:53:58AM +0100
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 11:53:58AM +0100, James Cronin wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> 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?
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.)
--
***************************************************************************
Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer@lightbearer.com http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/
