E-mail providers sat down with Internet Service Providers on Tuesday to talk about how they could defeat spam.
They found no solution, but agreed that spam could be controlled without hurting legitimate companies.
The event, a roundtable hosted by the Association for Interactive Marketing’s Council for Responsible E-mail Committee (CRE), was the first time AIM members have stared eyeball to eyeball with ISPs to discuss their common enemy.
"What’s new is this [feeling] that this issue must be addressed immediately," said said Michael Della Penna, co-chair of the CRE.
"The ISPs know that sources for creative ways for solving [the spam problem] is going to come from e-mail providers." said Della Penna, who is also chief marketing officer at e-mail marketing firm Bigfoot Interactive.
Although only two ISPs participated—America Online and Microsoft—because they are among the largest and most influential, CRE members were delighted. Some 25 to 30 CRE members attended the roundtable, which was spearheaded by the CRE’s Delivery Committee.
"The roundtable was a really good, open dialogue," said Kevin Noonan, AIM executive director.
The ISPs complained about the financial burden of spam. One day last month, AOL blocked 1 billion unwanted e-mail messages. Its previous high was 780 million spam messages.
E-mail providers typically hire an individual or small staff to continually communicate with ISPs and keep their clients’ e-mail flowing.
CRE members said there has to be a way to signal to the ISPs who the legitimate e-mail providers are.
The group discussed whether or not the white lists of good players, which are currently maintained by individual ISPs could be standardized, so "an e-mail provider or marketer who is not white-listed would not have to go through the same scrutiny by an ISP as someone who was not white-listed," Della Penna said.
How e-mail providers would be identified as white-listed firms was discussed, according to sources. Options from paying to get on the list to carrying a particular identifying seal were tossed around, according to sources.
"There was agreement on working together to distinguish solicited e-mail from unsolicited e-mail," Della Penna said.
But a solution has to be customer-directed, Noonan said. "The fact of the matter is if the marketer doesn’t think it’s spam, but the customer does—it’s spam," he said.
A best practices e-mail delivery draft document is being crafted by the CRE’s Delivery Committee, Della Penna said.
Generally, the best practices document will cover what marketers and e-mail service providers can do to distinguish their e-mail communications from unsolicited communications, Della Penna said.
It will discuss the use of opt-out and opt-in e-mail and hygiene, he said, declining to be specific. "It will certainly go as far as to say the higher the permission level, the better the chance that the e-mail will go through."
The ISPs will receive a copy of the draft when it is completed.
The document is expected to be finalized by mid-summer.
Also to come out of the meeting was the creation of four Delivery Committee subcommittees: a best practices draft subcommittee; a legislation subcommittee; an education subcommittee (to focus on educating consumers); and an ISP subcommittee (to facilitate continued dialogue with the ISPs).
AIM is not the only industry group grappling over this issue with the ISPs.
A group called JamSpam, whose goal is to produce an anti-spam specification that will address industry concerns and eliminate spam, has a number of ISPs as members. They include AOL, Microsoft, Earthlink, Yahoo and AT&T Worldnet. E-mail service providers, including Bigfoot Interactive, also belong to the group.
Another group, the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), is seeking out dialogues with ISPs.
Rather than developing "consent standards," the group is focused on coming up with is "a secure mechanism to identify senders [and] a mechanism for monitoring [e-mail providers’] performance," said Hans Peter Brondmo, senior vice president of strategy at e-mail marketing firm Digital Impact, who is chairing the NAI’s working group on technological solutions.
