Re: AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <suresh () hserus net>
Date: September 15, 2007 11:00:39 PM EDT
To: <dave () farber net>, "'Robert Grosshandler'" <rob () iGive com>
Subject: RE: [IP] AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of  
Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf

"Robert Grosshandler" <rob () iGive com> wrote: [on IP]

> Reputation isn't "political or social reputation" when used in this
> particular context. It refers to the opinions of the receivers'
> customers (the e-mail recipient, Hotmail and AOL's customers) as the
> "goodness" or "wantedness" of the sender's missives.

Well yes.  And when you contrast that with truthout's call for "public
pressure, they can ignore us but they can't ignore YOU" - well, let's  
put it
this way, AOL and Hotmail actually listening to their users is quite
probably what caused this block in the first place, especially given the
"reputation" word used there.

> to the size of their customer bases.  If a "lot" of their customers
> tell them that they are receiving unwanted e-mail from a sender, that
> sender's reputation suffers.  If a sender utilizes IP addresses that

That is typically specific numbers - if a certain percentage of people
receiving your newsletter click report as spam, then there's a good  
chance
you will get blocked or your mail flow slowed down coming into an ISP's
servers.

That will happen even faster if combined with your sending to a  
number of
email addresses on their domain that simply don't exist as you have a  
list
full of old addresses that you haven't bothered to clean out, or  
plain dud
addresses that some kind soul imported into your list from a big  
address CD
he bought somewhere and added to your list - both of which have  
happened to
nonprofits, and even more often to badly managed political action group
mailing lists.

> are used to send some other sender's unwanted e-mail, the sender's
> reputation suffers.  If a sender sends too much e-mail all at once,
> the sender's reputation suffers.  If the sender has "unclean" lists,
> with lots of bounces, their reputation suffers.  And so on.

Al Iverson has some wonderfully practical ways to responsibly manage  
your
mailing list that I would strongly recommend to someone who seems to be
getting blocked by both AOL and Hotmail - and quite likely by other  
ISPs out
there as well ..
<http://www.spamresource.com/2007/01/how-to-deliver-mail-to-aol.html>

All of that is quite easy to do (or at least free and requires a certain
amount of time you need to spend and look at just how you run your  
mailing
list).  Whatever Truthout is doing, they're certainly not running a very
responsibly managed mailing list. Certainly not when user feedback from
report spam buttons leads to filters going up in two different ISPs.

Righteous indignation and signed petitions aren't the way to go here.  
The
EFF found that out the hard way after their multiple campaigns  
against AOL
and other ISPs were broadly criticized by people who would otherwise  
support
them, and eventually fizzled out .. to their credit they haven't  
launched
one of those since the Goodmail one in 2006.

Their last campaign - about the goodmail issue - was a spectacular  
fizzle,
"came in with a bang and went out with a whimper" as T.S. Eliot would  
have
said. The sequence dearaol.com / the EFF followed on that one was like:

1. Campaign begins, there are several press releases and blog posts,
deeplinks etc made by various EFF people (Cindy Cohn, Brad Templeton,  
Danny
O'Brien etc) all with a very common meme being perpetuated -  
"blackmail",
"shakedown"

2. People step in to provide counterpoints. Tim Lee of the Technology
Liberation Front at http://www.techliberation.com/archives/038303.php -
talking about a long discussion I had with Danny on politech -
http://www.politechbot.com/2006/04/15/debate-over-dearaolcom/ (and  
ended up
comparing the way the EFF was operating in this case to Karl Rove -
http://www.circleid.com/posts/eff_use_of_propaganda_karl_rove/)

3. End result? Dearaol.com fizzled, and the last post to their blog,  
dated
May 9 2006 (and broadly critical of Goodmail, again a shakedown meme  
spread
there) is now only accessible over google cache
<http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:www.dearaol.com/blog> as the  
domain
registration seems to have lapsed.

4. And meanwhile - AOL continues to use goodmail, and nobody, but  
nobody has
been blackmailed, or shaken down, or whatever to send mail to AOL.   
We have
40 million ++ users on our service.  And our users face zero issues
delivering their email to their friends / colleagues that use AOL email
addresses.

> monitoring and compliance, and they're sometimes challenging (we have
> problems right now with Centurytel and Barracuda Networks.)  But I

The suggestions Al Iverson posted on spamresource.org (above) would  
help you
too. Challenging - well yes it is, beyond a certain level, and  
depending on
the persons you are dealing with at a particular blocklist. But the very
large ISPs - say AOL - certainly have people, that I've met and whose
competence I respect - working on this issue.

> If they are able to say that they've jumped through those e-mail
> reputation hoops, and that their bounce rate is low, and that their
> spam complaint rate is low, and that they handle unsubscribes in a
> timely fashion, and they're still being blocked, THEN the political
> avenue may be the best route to take.

I would be so very surprised if they didn't quickly get unblocked if  
they
took a bit of time to fix their mailing list management practices ..

        srs



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