On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 11:53:58AM +0100, James Cronin wrote:
Hi,
I'm working on a bulk (opt in!) email delivery system at the moment, and over the years I've heard a number of possibly apocryphal stories about people requiring contracts with large email suppliers (Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc..) in order to be able to guarantee delivery and lower the risk of email that's been requested by an end user being mistakenly blackholed or treated as spam by their ISP (or webmail provider).
Has anyone ever actually come across such a contract in real life or are they just urban myths?
The contracts... for most of them are urban myth. Perhaps not for all, and since my NDA has now expired, I can say publically that I was involved with Earthlink (just after the Mindspring merger) considering whether they would need this sort of contract in some circumstances (and, more directly what I was involved with, the inverse - contracts for bulk suppliers who were not spammers, laying out what they needed to do to not get smacked with the AUP). I have also, recently, had problems with BellSouth's servers rejecting legitimate mailing list emails to at least one user; it is not clear whether the volume is the cause, but since the server in question isn't on any of the open-relay lists, and is getting a 550 "anti-spam"ish error message, while other servers can reach the same user perfectly well... (Note: the lists in question follow all of the relevant RFCs, including those for List-Id headers, Precedence headers, etc.) -- *************************************************************************** Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com lucifer@lightbearer.com http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/