On Fri, 2011-02-11 at 13:25 -0500, Kris Deugau wrote: > Gary Smith wrote: > >>> Anyway, the question is, how does the community as a whole deal with > >>> big ISP's losing email? It seems that some companies (like ATT) seem > >>> to have less and less access to tools necessary for communicating with > >>> them on things like this. Is there any know lists of contact/support > >>> channels out there that people use for the larger ISP's? > >> > >> As already stated, there's not a huge amount that you can do on your > >> own. However, if you're prepared to part with a bit of cash, then you > >> could look into using a whitelisting agent such as SuretyMail or > >> ReturnPath. > > > > Andy, > > > > Problem isn't white/grey/black listings, its that they accepted the email > > with a valid return code but it never made it to the destination box. It > > only seems to be happened on a few recipients. Basically, in short, the > > destination ISP (in this case ATT) is making some type of decision as to > > what email you are receiving. Buying additional technology won't exactly > > solve this problem. > > Actually it might work; chances are there's a spam filter on the > recipient side eating the message without telling anyone, and shelling > out for a whitelist "certification" may help get through that filter. >
Yes, exactly. If mail comes from an IP address that has been certified by one of the white-listing agents, then generally there is a lot less chance of it "disappearing". Look at it from the ISP's point of view: If there is a list of IP addresses that are almost guaranteed to be spam free, then why use CPU power to process those emails through your spam filters? It also keeps an ISP's customers happier, because their customers don't like emails sent to them disappearing, as much as you don't. I started using SuretyMail a couple of years ago and I've had a lot less complaints from users that their mail didn't make it to a recipient. I found that using the line "well it was delivered to the remote mail server" didn't necessarily help :-) ReturnPath are the other company that I'm aware of, and I think they have a pretty close relationship with Hotmail, but IIRC they are a lot more expensive, and their sales department weren't particularly helpful at the time. > It's by no means *guaranteed*, though. > Correct. I still have a few emails go "missing", and of course an agent comes at a cost. Andy
