Nice Deal If You Can Get It
Let's see if I understand this. Sender Score Certified offers a free email whitelist service to ISPs. But emailers have to pay them if they want to be certified sender.
If this is truly how it works, then ISPs shouldn't use this service from Return Path. Entities shouldn't have to pay to be on an accepted list for email delivery unless ALL entities pay.
Posted by PSoTD on
Friday May 9, 2008 at 8:15am |
The whole black/gray/whitelisting concept, if to be continued, needs to be run by much more clear rules and expectations by the public.
My take (not surprisingly) is that payment by senders for the Sender Score Certifed program makes sense.
The Sender Score Certified Program costs a good deal of money to run: processing applications, ongoing review of clients' performance vs. program standards, other compliance operations all cost money to provide. To break even on our operations we need to charge for the program.
We (and our ISP partners) are not requiring clients to pay for the program:
Clients get large benefits from the program - their email is much more likely to get delivered, images show by default at certain ISPs. They wouldn't pay if the economics didn't make sense.
More importantly, mailers don't need to be part of our program to get their mail delivered at our ISP partners - they just need to run their mail programs in a way that creates a good email reputation (few subscribers hitting the report spam button and other measures of reputation). Our program simply makes it easier for mailers to present themselves as good mailers.
- "Clients get large benefits from the program - their email is much more likely to get delivered, images show by default at certain ISPs. They wouldn't pay if the economics didn't make sense." This holds true for larger organizations, and not for the small organizations. Yet you say that "mailers don't need to be part of our program to get their mail delivered at our ISP partners" so why is it that larger organizations, with a bigger budget, need this more than smaller organizations, with a tighter budget?
What do you mean specifically by "other measures of reputation"? This is the nub of the entire issue, and yet isn't really understood by an overwhelming majority of email users. I'm not even convinced that all ISPs understand it, either.
If I want to use SSC or the Habeas whitelist, or any other whitelist or blacklist to manage my inbound mail, what's the problem with that? Why do I have any responsibility to accept mail from you or anyone else? It's not like you're paying me to deliver your ads.
Second of all - the point is, shouldn't your customers understand how you're making this determination? After all, they are somehow under the belief that it's THEIR EMAIL ADDRESS. And they're paying for it.
I'm not griping as a sender as much as a recipient.