At 02:05 PM 1/26/2007 -0500, Stuart Gathman wrote:
Either way, forwarding puts your (the forwarders) reputation at risk.
If the receiver does not whitelist you, any spam you forward to them
counts against your reputation. As reputation systems become more
prevalent, forwarders will need to demand whitelisting from recipients.
This is already happening with AOL. Google for AOL forwarding, and
you'll see that mailing list managers (a similar reputation problem
to forwarding) find themselves either:
a) banning aol.com recipients from the mailing list
b) using VERP to immediately unsubscribe any recipient reporting
a list message as spam.
Failure to take either of the above steps allows any clueless or malicious
AOL user (ok, likely the former) to DOS every mailing list hosted on that
IP for all AOL users.
I've had similar problems with Yahoo labeling as spam anything we forwarded
to one of our yahoo.com recipients. They now have us on their whitelist,
but it took a lot of effort for just one ESP. I wonder if a more efficient
way to communicate with such companies would be to refer our clients having
such problems to a published list of "Reputable Email Service
Providers". If even half of these clients switched to another service,
that might be sufficient incentive for an ESP to streamline its
whitelisting procedures, and get on the list.
I know these big companies like to minimize their support costs by offering
their clients very few choices or options, but this could be done without
any client interaction. If an AOL subscriber reports his own forwarder as
a spammer, AOL should recognize that as a unique situation, and give the
forwarder a reasonable time to remove that subscriber. Seems like this is
not too much different than a legitimate mailing list getting an invalid
spam report.
Is anyone interested in helping me compile such a list?
-- Dave
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