Rising Above the Horde: How to Cope With ISPs’ Filters

As spam proliferates, non-delivery has become the No. 1 aggravation for e-mail service providers and marketers. To combat spam, Internet service providers are filtering out spam. The problem is much valid commercial e-mail is filtered out with it.

“Over 75% of e-mail tagged as spam is legitimate e-mail,” said Dave Lewis, vice president of deliverability management and ISP relations at Digital Impact, presenting a Webinar on “Delivering E-mail in a Newly Hostile Environment,” on Wednesday.

“Although the ISPs are well-intentioned, the filtering is based on guesswork,” Lewis said. “It doesn’t take permission e-mail into account.”

The ISP is like a castle with a moat, a drawbridge and ramparts, according to Lewis. Commercial e-mailers are the merchants of the community. Spammers are the horde.

“The ISPs are under siege, but high up on the ramparts, they can’t tell a merchant from the horde,” he said. “If you look like a spammer, you are one—in the ISP’s view.”

To communicate with the ISPs and work toward resolving this problem, Digital Impact, along with 18 other e-mail service providers, formed a coalition on Tuesday through the Network Advertising Initiative. They plan to develop a white list of good players—e-mail marketers who follow prescribed best practices and keep their spam complaints low.

E-mailers look like spammers to ISPs if their volume of e-mail or their bounce rate exceeds the ISP’s threshold. That threshold number is not made public, and it differs for each ISP. But e-mail that goes above the threshold is blocked or redirected to junk mailboxes.

ISP and desktop filters scan e-mail body text, subject line and sender name for keyword matches that tip them the message is spam. “The problem is that some of the best words used by marketers are also on these content filter lists, like ‘free,’ ‘money-back guarantee,’ and ‘new and improved.’”

ISPs also block or redirect e-mail when people with accounts complain that an e-mail is spam. America Online’s new e-mail software, 8.0 is particularly egregious to marketers because it features a “report spam” button. After hitting the button, two choices appear: “Send Report” and “Send and Block.”

“A spam complaint is generated regardless of which of those two options you hit,” Lewis said, in an interview after the Webinar. “And those complaints add up to AOL’s threshold for blocking e-mail.”

Lewis said that e-mail providers are in favor of empowering the consumer to make determinations about their inbox, but people are more likely to make a complaint if they’ve been on a list for awhile and been inactive. They may forget they opted in. “A lot of the complaints are circumstantial,” he said.

Another problem with AOL 8.0, is the program lets account holders activate a mailbox feature that sorts mail into one of three folders: “People I Know,” “Bulk” and “Unknown Sender.” On AOL, the complete subject line is not visible, Lewis said, and that combined with a crowded mailbox and a handy spam button, “predisposes a recipient to identify a message as spam.”

Instead of a “ Bulk” folder, AOL should perhaps have an “unsubscribe” button and report those choices to e-mail providers, Lewis said.

There are more than 300 blacklists operated by ISPs and others. They contain addresses the ISPs have deemed belong to spammers. “Virtually all e-mail marketers are on one or more blacklist,” he said.

What can marketers do to avoid filtering? “There are no quick fixes or easy answers,” Lewis warned. Sidestepping blockage requires the long-term commitment of the marketer, the e-mail provider and the ISP working together.

Some suggestions for marketers:
*Make sure you get explicit permission for each type of communication. Don’t use pre-checked boxes.
*Keep the list clean. “There is no big e-mail list in the sky that you can bounce each e-mail against to see if it’s deliverable,” Lewis said. But the practice of mailing something out three to five times to see if it’s deliverable, “is asking the ISP to manage your list for you.”
*Find out the definitions of the ISPs’ codes and text messages about undeliverable e-mail. Find out why each e-mail wasn’t delivered, so you can take appropriate action.
*Develop real-time metrics to monitor your list well and discover what is happening with the ISPs. This would help see, for example, if e-mail is backed up with an ISP, which puts it in peril of exceeding that ISP’s threshold.