On 6/8/2018 11:50 AM, Michael Peddemors wrote:
It is sometimes important to point out that the email marketing is a
multi-billion dollar business.. The spam protection and RBL operators
get very little money if any in comparison..
I was reading an ebook on marketing this past week - mistakenly thinking
that it would have good suggestions for non-spamming social media
advertising - but it was really all about exploiting email lists - to
its credit, it was all whitehat permissions-based confirmed-option
stuff. So it wasn't a "how to spam" book. The real life examples of
financial rewards from this business that it provided, when done well,
were so shockingly lucrative and EASY - that it made me wonder, "what am
I doing trying to run a blacklist... when I could be doing THIS!"
...and everything else you said below is excellent!
They are always going to have more money to spend on finding ways to
get their email delivered, that the poor front line systems admin's
and RBL operators trying to deal with customer complaints..
So, there is the aspect that the RBL's and system admin's are going to
need cost effective ways to address this, and that is sometimes more
important than 'perfect' ways to address the issues.
IMHO, and the way most of our platforms are designed to work.. Empower
the users when you can.. but block the worst of the worst..
* Block at SMTP via RBL's that have very low false positive rates
* Try to use RBL's that allow those few false positives to be quickly
removed.
* Tag as spam via RBL's where the system admin SHOULD be addressing
the egress problem, but where the source could be a shared
environment, eg a mix of good and bad, where the bad complaints
outnumber the good..
* Increase the 'score' via RBL's where it is too big to block, but the
problem users aren't being addressed by the system operators.
* Allow Users to make the final decision, eg, this is not spam/this is
spam.
Anyone who says they can provide 100% accurate spam protection, is
lying to your face. In the real world, there will always be an email
that one person wants, and the other person doesn't want, so you can't
argue, you have to let the customer decide.
And while using that as feedback might seem the logical conclusion, in
the real world we still see more feedback reports from legitimate
email the customer should have wanted, vs emails tagged as spam that
are spam.
Probably, because most systems doing ingress spam protection are
pretty good accurate nowadays..
But more onus has to be put on the senders networks..
Not to call anyone out, but as far as too big to block goes, those
senders have a lot more money to invest in egress filtering, and have
better optics into the behavior, than the poor guys on the receiving
end, however as history shows, the senders often don't worry about it
as much, even though they have the budgets, UNTIL it impacts
legitimate business..
And there are hosting companies out there that simply have a blind eye
towards the activity on their networks..
So SOMETIMES RBL operators and/or system admins have only one cost
effective way to address the issue, and that is to put the IP(s)
and/or networks on the 'rejection' list.. until conditions approved..
Still way too much IPv4 space is wasted by known spammer havens.. And
when it comes to IPv6, well years of reputation history can be undone
in a single moment, when you allow a whole brand new internet of
'fresh' IP(s) to be used.. eg IPv6
Have a happy Spam Freeeeeeeeee Weekend all..
--
Rob McEwen
https://www.invaluement.com
_______________________________________________
mailop mailing list
mailop@mailop.org
https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
