Presumably, if a company is contracting with Postini to act as their agent in handling their e-mail delivery, they have the expectation that Postini will take reasonable care in delivering (or scoring) that e-mail.

If Postini willfully and systematically ignores information that they are failing to do so… I think there’s an argument that it’s negligence.

I’m explicitly *not* making the 1990s spammer argument that “Recipient ISPs have no right to filter”. My argument, then and now, was that recipient ISPs have the right to do whatever their customers want.

Rather, I’m stating that I don’t think Postini’s customers want Postini to do what Postini is actually doing. Who here has asked their ISP to knowingly drop legitimate, non-bulk e-mail on the floor and ignore complaints? Anyone?

Add to that:

* Postini is a division of Google
* Google is a publicly traded company
* Publicly traded companies must behave in compliance with many, many laws and regulations
* Postini explicitly markets themselves to law firms as a comprehensive e-mail solution
* Lawyers don’t like it when they can’t get e-mail from their clients
* Also, they sue a lot
* Postini’s behavior is arguably in conflict with Google’s published Code of Conduct
* Shareholders have a right to expect the company to enforce its Code
* Google’s Investor Relations department has failed to answer questions from at least one shareholder (Hi!) on this very matter

I think this could a make a lawyer rich someday. How many people are in the class of “everyone who has sent an e-mail to a Postini client”?

The problem is that each recipient of a bulk email has little incentive to try to get a filtering decision reversed, but the sender of the bulk email has great incentive to do so. However, senders have that incentive regardless of whether the filtering decision was valid or not.

So, the problem for Filterers is that most of the people who try to get them to reverse their decisions will do so regardless of the validity of the decisions. So, they need a way to evaluate these requests so as to filter out the invalid ones, and then they need a way to act upon the valid ones.

As for whether such a remediation process is a “must,” I think the fact that many large ISPs (e.g., AOL, Hotmail) and other spam-filtering systems (e.g., Brightmail) have such processes, and have had them for years, provides sufficient evidence to establish that proposition’s truth.