On Monday, March 7, 2005, 12:38:19 PM, Chris Santerre wrote:

Wow this is even a better article!

http://etdeliverability.typepad.com/chips_deliverability_tips/2004/10/brand_names_und.html

Perhaps we should get in touch with the people of Pivotal Veracity?? Check out this paragraph:

"How does this affect you? My friends at Pivotal Veracity who offer phenomenal new technology for tracking email deliveries to top ISP's recently completed a study on the topic of SURBL's and deliverability. They found that emails containing a blocked URL were blocked entirely at 5 of the 20 ISP's tested, while 7 ISP's moved the email to the bulk folder.

Wow, so we're reaching 12 of 20 ISPs they tested. That sounds kind of high at this point. They may be crediting SURBL where other URI blocking technologies are actually being used, such as AOL's. OTOH SURBLs are (quietly) used by some of the largest ISPs and webmail providers on the net at this point.

Also, their tests showed that emails with blocked URL's were filtered to bulk or discarded at 50% of medium to larger enterprises.

50% of businesses also sounds too high. I don't know what the SpamAssassin and other mail filter deployment is like however. And the list of applications using SURBLs still continues to grow, seemingly daily:

http://www.surbl.org/links.html

Pivotal Veracity's new product, eBrand Monitor (also offered via ExactTarget's Inbox Detective), helps companies detect blocking before it causes problems."

For those keeping count, that leaves 8 ISPs that need a LART ;)

I suspect this is why Jeff always yells at me to get our FP rate lower! But I love how the article ends. Clearly shows legit companies that they need to keep track of their affiliates, because they can and will hurt their brand.

--Chris

I've added the following comment to that article:

"Any legitimate mailer who finds their domain listed on SURBLs is welcome to submit a report to whitelist at surbl.org. They should include full and complete contact information for their organization, information about their sending servers such as IP addresses, a sample outbound message with full headers and full message body including URIs, and a description of their organization and its published mail practices, especially including published anti-spam policies. We typically unlist organizations that do not make large-scale use of spam.

Generally speaking those who don't spam will never get listed on SURBLs, and our false positive rate is very low.

Jeff Chan http://www.surbl.org/"

And yes, we do need to get the FP rate lower, especially on WS. :-)

Jeff C. -- "If it appears in hams, then don't list it."