“You’re an expert in the field, which ESP will give me the best inbox delivery?”

The thing is, there isn’t an answer to that question.

ESPs have expertise in sending large amounts of mail.  All have staff that manage and monitor MTAs. Most have staff that provide advice on delivery issues. Many have staff that handle abuse complaints, FBLs and blocks.

What they don’t have is magic delivery fairies or bat phones into postmaster desks.

Simply moving mail to an ESP won’t give you delivery. For the most part, delivery is the responsibility of the sender, whether they send mail through an in house system or through an ESP.

Delivery is primarily about how recipients react to a particular mail stream. Send mail recipients want, interact with and relate to and you usually see good delivery. The IP addresses or infrastructure contribute but do not dominate the equation. Sending from an ESP won’t fix poor content, irrelevant mail or unengaged recipients.

I can hear everyone now shouting at their screen “What about shared IPs!!!?!?!” Yes, yes, if you use an ESP with shared IP addresses and the ESP gets a bad customer you may see poor delivery for a time because one of their other customers was bad. It’s a fact, it happens. Plus, if you use an ESP with dedicated IPs and the ESP gets a bad customer you may see poor delivery for a time because one of the other customers was bad and their IP is near yours.

So clearly the answer is to bring email in house. That way no other company can affect your delivery, right? Yes. Kinda.

Are you willing to invest money in hiring email and DNS savvy sysadmins? Invest money in a MTA designed to handle bulk mail? Invest in an expert who not only understands bounce handling, but can explain to your developers what a good bounce handling system must do? Invest in someone who can manage authentication like DKIM? Who can handle delivery issues and understands how to talk to ISPs? Invest in development to write a FBL processor?

For some companies, the internal investment is the right answer, and bringing mail in house makes business sense.

For a lot of companies, though, they just want to use email to communicate with customers. They don’t want to have to invest in multiple staff members (as it’s very rare to find a single person with all the various skill sets needed) to just send a weekly newsletter, or daily sales email. They need a tool that works, they don’t need to know how to sign up for a FBL, they don’t need to know how to handle bounces. They can outsource that work and focus on the communication value.

Finding the best ESP starts with finding out how you want to use email.

Question 1: What role does email play in my business?

Experian CheetahMail identified an isolated incident in which someone used a valid client user ID and password to gain access to the client’s email account and transmit an unauthorized and unlawful email. To recipients, the email appeared as a solicitation from an unrelated sender (disguised as Adobe) and directed viewers to an illicit website requesting credit card information. The impact was limited to a single, targeted outbound email.

I have a few suggestions for companies to be able to identify these types of attacks before mail goes out.

1) Set up monitoring to look for large number of uploads in a particular account. Tens of millions of new addresses, even spread over multiple uploads, should raise red flags and trigger manual review of an account.

2) Scan outgoing messages for links mentioning or advertising Adobe (all the spams so far seem to be linking to adobe phish sites).

3) Monitor for unusual send activity. A customer that sends small amounts of mail regularly, but all of a sudden spikes to 10 or 100 times more mail may be compromised.

4) Monitor FBLs for spikes in activity.

5) Monitor bounces for spikes in activity.

Much of this monitoring should trivially slot into the monitoring that you’re already doing as an ESP. You may want to add alerts to go out to relevant people inside your company.

My work account gets very little spam in the folder I use as my inbox. I’m not even sure exactly why this is, but it’s true. One of the exceptions is a psychic (no, really) who has a copy of one of my work email addresses and she regularly spams me offering her spiritual guidance and the opportunity to buy her stuff in order to make peace within my world.  I’ve received these before, usually I just delete them and move on.

Occasionally, though, I long for the ease of a “this is spam” button. Just to be able to hit a single button, no work, no effort and know that I have registered my frustration with a spammer. Today was one of those days. I really don’t want this psychic spam in my mailbox. It seems reasonably professionally done, though, so I check the headers to see if it’s being send from any ESP I know and if it’s worth my time to send in a “hey, didn’t sign up for this, and no, I didn’t forget, either” email.

I visited the website belonging to the domain sending the mail.

This is OnLetterhead

This domain points to OnLetterhead, a branded email and e-newsletter solution. You may have received an email which pointed you to this page. If you prefer not to receieve anymore emails from the sender, you may submit a request via email to our abuse department: support@onletterhead.com.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

That tells me all I need to know about sending in a notice. At best they’ll unsubscribe me. But I suspect  they’ll screw that up and I will still get their mail. At worst they’ll end up arguing with me that I did sign up and I should not be complaining about the mail because I opted in.

I love my mailsystem and the control it gives me, but today I’d really like that ‘this is spam’ button. In one simple click I could set a filter to bulk any future mail from this sender, send a notice to the sender that their mail was viewed as spam by one recipient, and give a small negative to that sender’s reputation. Maybe that would stop them from spamming me.