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Microsoft Will Sell Whitelist Services For Hotmail
Posted by
timothy
on Wed May 05, 2004 07:39 AM
from the get-what-you-pay-for dept.
from the get-what-you-pay-for dept.
Ec|ipse writes "Looks like Microsoft has found another way to make money, this time from spam. Microsoft has adopted a "whitelist" program (Bonded Sender by IronPort) which will allow marketers to pay Microsoft so that they are included on a special whitelist, guaranteeing uninteruptable delivery of their messages to Hotmail and MSN users. You can catch the full article at Excite. I especially like the nice naming for spammers, calling them 'marketers' sounds so much more legitimate."
mgibbs adds "Hopefully the $20K fine that results from abuse of this system is enough to deter spammers."
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It's also a list to avoid! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's also a list to avoid! (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that IronPort, not Microsoft, is running this list. IronPort are the same people who purchased SpamCop. IronPort's business is SPAM prevention.
There are plenty of legitimate companies that don't SPAM that have IronPort bonds. Especially where these companies are sending out 'Technical Errata' or trying to run product support over E-mail.
Now you can argue that 'Technical Errata' sometimes has embedded ads (usually not), and sometimes is unsolicited (usually not) - but most people who ask for it think it's useful. If I send a company an Email asking them about how to fix thier broken product, I surely wouldn't want the reply to be stuck in a SPAM filter (this happens to me once or twice a month).
If you want to use IronPort's whitelist service, inquire at thier web site [ironport.com].
Parent
Re:It's also a list to avoid! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they play both sides [ironport.com] of the fence.
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Re:It's also a list to avoid! (Score:4, Funny)
I know, just look at that feature list. Header forgery. Message obfuscation. Relay and proxy discovery and use. Listwashing.
Oh wait. Those aren't there. It's just really fast. String 'em up anyway, no one's got business sending that much email!
Parent
Re:It's also a list to avoid! (Score:4, Informative)
I believe the intention of the whitelist is for companies like airlines, Fedex, etc to send legitimate email notifications to their customers without having to worry about SpamAssassin throwing their email in the trash.
Presumably there is some sort of due diligence that is done before bonded status is granted so that any ol' spammer can't just pony up $20k and get on the list. One thing is for sure -- they wouldn't stay on that list if they are found to be spamming.
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And then (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a BOND, not a payment (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is a BOND, not a payment (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:This is a BOND, not a payment (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:This is a BOND, to IRONPORT (Score:5, Informative)
IronPort [ironport.com] is NOT Microsoft [microsoft.com]! IronPort is selling a service which Microsoft has purchased for the purpose of using on Microsoft's Hotmail (and MSN) mail service.
Parent
The article is unclear (Score:5, Insightful)
I could see that legit ads (i.e. you definitely signed up to recieve them) might be tossed out with the huge amount of spam. What Microsoft *might* be doing here is saying "OK, you say you are opt-in, we'll let your stuff through, but we're gonna take a bite out of you if you are lying to us."
Unfortunately, the author of the article didn't bother to state exactly what the rules are that Microsoft is imposing. Roast the journalist, not Microsoft (at least, not yet).
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Re:This is a BOND, not a payment (Score:5, Insightful)
The beef I have with this scheme is that since it's the user that's inconvenienced by the spam, the bond money should be sent to them in the event of a violation. The fact that Microsoft is the one getting the funds is what makes it seem like a money grab.
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Re:This is a BOND, not a payment (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is a BOND, not a payment (Score:4, Insightful)
I grew up with publications that were, essentially, advertisements. Remember Computer Shopper? You never read the articles, did you? I sure didn't...but I read the ads. Same with RC Hobbiest. Nowadays, I get all sorts of cool publications and catalogues in the mail...VW Trends, Road Runner Sports, JC Whitney for Volkswagens, Crutchfield, Campmor, Victoria's Secret...and you know what, I look through them all. I don't always buy stuff, but I always find interesting things I didn't know existed (especially in that last one). Believe it or not, I enjoy that.
Now, email has opened up the door even further. I get catalogs from teeny tiny agencies that would never be able to offer them offline for the expense. I like that...I like looking through the clearance items at some obscure Bug shop in Tampa Bay that I'd never find out about otherwise. I just wish these mails would make it through my spam filter!
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Re:This is a BOND, not a payment (Score:4, Insightful)
MicroSoft doesn't get the bond, bondedsender gets the bond. Bondedsender has an incentive to whack spammers quickly so as to get the bond money. This discourages spammers from using bondedsender, which encourages ISPs like MSN/Hotmail to use them.
If you get a spam from somone on the bondedsender program, just report it via spamcop.net. The report automatically goes to bondedsender. If you are not sure if the spam came from someone using bondedsender, just report it via spamcop.net and let them figure it out.
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This should encourage everyone to move to Gmail! (Score:4, Insightful)
- Google's Gmail OR
- Novell's MyRealEmail....
Then this is a f***ing dozey way to do it!
You know, (Score:4, Funny)
I couldn't think of anything
I guess I'm just not as imaginative as MS.
I'll bet the GMail team is doing a little dance of joy at reading this
FREE VA.LIUM X-A-N-A-X no P R E S C R I P T I O N (Score:4, Funny)
why using hotmail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why using hotmail? (Score:4, Informative)
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Little Guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Large companies can afford to drop a payment on this but the small business/non-profit sure can't.
following Yahoo's footsteps (Score:5, Insightful)
they have their "spam" filtering yet there are types of spam that will not go away as they have "special" spam from their "partners" that will NEVER EVER hit their filtering rules for spam.
I am betting that ALL free email sites will do this within this year.
In Denmark it is illegal to send spam! (Score:4, Informative)
So unless you check the checkbox somewhere in your hotmail registration, you will be able to sue MS - in Denmark at least...
Re:In Denmark it is illegal to send spam! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
If only they would share the proceeds (Score:5, Interesting)
If a company is going to sell my resources (time spent downloading/reading/procesing email) they had better share the revenues with me.
Re:If only they would share the proceeds (Score:4, Insightful)
People here should know that putting a pricetag on something doesn't make everything kosher.
Bulk mail without opt-in should be criminalized regardless if the envelope is paper, SMTP or whatever. Bulk mail is just another form of 'I have money, I can send propaganda to anybody, you cannot stop me, muahahaha!".
Rant over.
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Re:If only they would share the proceeds (Score:5, Interesting)
I was amused to find in the bounce mailbox one day an auto-reply from a person who offered to read our message if we'd deposit $5 into his account via Paypal. I don't remember the website, but I wonder if anyone has ever paid $5 to have their email delivered.
Some real companies might be willing to pay $0.05 to $0.15 if it really meant their message was being read. Our small business probably couldn't afford it though. And I'd hate to see the whole email system become pay-per-view.
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Selling Data (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup, I guess it does give them the right to do that.
So THAT's why Longhorn will require WiFi! (Score:3, Funny)
So, is there any chance that if those features are advertised widely, fewer people will buy Longhorn?
personal experience (Score:5, Informative)
Do any journalists know how to use english? (Score:5, Insightful)
allow legitimate marketers to thread the gauntlet of spam filters
- run the gauntlet
- thread the needle
choose one.D.
Good luck getting bonded... I tried! (Score:5, Interesting)
The BondedSender process looked us over and saw that we had, *gasp*, 50 complaints with a volume of 20 million messages sent. One complaint per million is their threshold for acceptance into the program! This is unreasonable. People complain about messages from their own damn family in my experience. The geeks here wont understand because they are literate of the issues surrounding the politics of email... but your average citizen is going to flip out and start whacking the "report as spam" button for anything they don't want to receive: their buddy sending them a dirty joke they don't want, an alert from their bank about their account being low, mailings from their girlfriend breaking up with them, etc.
This is absolutely true. I've heard the horror stories from my contacts at the aforementioned top 10 ISP's. The number of complaints they get about private emailings to and from their own contact lists rivals the number of messages that are actually spam.
I have an associate that works at large-bank-corp and they get about 1 per 10,000 complaints for their goddamn credit card statements!
BondedSender will be short lived unless they relax their restrictions. Any spammer sending pr0n and v|agra mailings is going to not be interested in this deal simply because of the costs and hassle of getting bonded. It's cheaper for Ma Bulker to just switch ISP's every two weeks or scam open relays.
Anyway... that's my say... Good luck if you try getting Bonded.
MS isn't sellling anything, they are buying (Score:5, Informative)
MicroSoft isn't selling anything, they are using the services of another company, namely bondedsender.com.
Who are bondedsender? They are part of ironport systems, who also own spamcop.net. Spam reported to spamcop.net automatically gets reported to bondedsender.com and the spammer gets whacked.
This is really good news because spamcop.net/ironport were recently sued by the spammer snotty scott richter. This means that ironport will have more income to not only fight the spam lawsuit but fight spam in general.
May be a good, realistic approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone thinking there is a greed motive for this is wrong. There is no way that Microsoft would trade this much bad press for the paltry amounts of money that this could generate. So, here's what I think is happening.
Microsoft has been pursuing various antispam paths, but the ultimate one, enforceable legislation to stop it, has encountered some resistance unless the legislation's effects are limited in some way. I think they are trying to counter some of this resistance.
There are occassions that I get "spam" from software companies (whose products I've used in the past) advertising new products. I don't mind that kind of spam, yet I almost always find them in my spam box because I use a pure white list approach and forgot to put the company on my white list.
The kind of spam that really drives me nuts and causes me to switch addresses is the spam that's looking for that one sucker in a million, the viagra spam, the refinancing spam, and the pornographic spam.
If the guidelines a) ban the improper spam while allowing contacts from other companies and b) strongly enforce requests to remove my email from a list, I could live with this system. Especially if they implement a one stop shop to manage whose lists I'm removed from.
But why would I want to live with this? Because it cuts the only leg of the spammers arguments that has been getting any mileage at all out from under them. If you create an enforceable system and say, "you can spam if you follow the rules of this system", then they can't argue that their "legitimate" spam is being blocked anymore and all antispam legislation suddenly gets a green light.
Very low complaint threshold (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone that does legitimate commercial mailings (opt-in, for our MMORPG [ataleinthedesert.com], about 15,000 messages per month to current and past players), this strikes me as slightly expensive, and somewhat dangerous. Some math...
Typically I get about 10 angry letters per newsletter, so that's $200 to send each newsletter. A cost of 1.3 cents per email isn't bad, since I know that most people read what I send.
Two problems. First, most newsletters go through now. Maybe 10% get spam filtered (I should probably set up a way to track this). So reaching those additional people costs 13 cents each. That is expensive.
Second, I worry that if the system becomes well known, it would be griefed: A single player with a bone to pick would sign up under a bunch of email addresses and "complain" from each. I'm not sure how to resolve this.
Not how it works (Score:5, Informative)
SpamAssassin also has commercial whitelists (Score:4, Informative)
READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE (Score:5, Informative)
For those too st00pid to read it, here's your list of clues. Microsoft gets no money, IronPort gets the money.
If you're a legitimate emailer (i.e. you email to people who have asked for email) IronPort takes the $20K up front as a bond. If you spam, you get knocked off the whitelist and they take your $20K.
It's not "pay $20K and spam all you want". It's "put up $20K to say that you won't spam".
As someone else here said, their standards are *very* high. You must have no more than 1 complaint per million emails, which is a very low number. Having run double-opt-in lists myself before, I assure you that cluefucks will complain about something that they signed up for (and confirmed) the day before.
As an ISP, let me say that this is a great program.
They are very anal
It was already impossible to block their SPAM (Score:5, Interesting)
The hole Ironport wants you to install (Score:5, Informative)
describe RCVD_IN_BONDEDSENDER Received via a whitelisted Bonded Sender address
score RCVD_IN_BONDEDSENDER -100.000
Note that "-100.000". That says "accept this, even if it looks like spam". You might want to use, say, "-3.0" instead. Give them a little credit, but don't open the floodgates.
Watch for spam with the "RCVD_IN_BONDEDSENDER" flag in the X-Spam-Status header line. You might want to have Mozilla (I assume Slashdot readers aren't using Outlook) move such messages into a "Bonded Sender" folder. That lets you watch what they're sending.
As soon as you find a real spam passed by BondedSender, please post it to NANAE.
But that makes Usenet less useful (Score:5, Interesting)
However, that makes my email address less useful, and Usenet a less useful resource.
I've never disguised my email address on Usenet or anywhere else (with the exception of some of the more pointless web site registrations). There have been plenty of times I've gone back to ancient archives digging for answers, come across someone who solved almost what I'm trying to do, and sent them an email asking if they'd mind helping me. And the converse has happened too - many people I don't know have emailed me over the years after coming across old posts, and I've helped out where possible.
I'm pretty defiant over this one. I refuse let low-life scum dictate how I can use my address. I am not going to jump through hoops at their behest - my email address is a contact point, and people should be able to use it to contact me.
Cheers,
Ian
Parent
Re:Nice One (Score:5, Interesting)
We've been used to it since 1976: An Open Letter to Hobbyists [blinkenlights.com].
Parent
Actually, this DOES make sense (Score:4, Insightful)
One of them I buy stuff from infrequently - Overstock.com. I get an email from them every day, usually delete it right off, but I don't mind getting it because I did, indeed, sign up for it when I bought something from them the first time.
Ironport's service isn't just a "pay us lots of money and we'll look the other way" thing - the people in question do indeed have to stick to decent ethics about what they're selling, and to whom, and make sure it's damn easy to get off the list. So I view this as a relatively ambivalent thing.
It's not good, in the sense that spammers may manage to sneak in. But it's not bad, because the spammers will likely get zapped pretty fast, and because the idea of REAL companies putting up a bond of trust, "their money where their mouth is" so to speak with regard to a code of conduct, is a GOOD THING.
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Re:It all makes perfect sense now. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:It all makes perfect sense now. (Score:5, Informative)
They're talking $20 per complaint, after your "free" complaints per month. Which, for the "low" volumne bulk sender( less than 1,000,000 per month), is 1 complaint per month.
So, for the above example, 10 complains - 1 free complaint * $20 is $180. The sign up costs are $375 Application, $500 license, $500 bond.
So after your first month, you've spent $875, bonded $500, e-mailed 500,000 messages, and lost $180.
And somewhere else, I thought read that if your bond drops below half, you have to replace it. So they've effectively created a charge system for spam.
This would be quite nice if they donated some of the bond money to, say, the SpamAssassin Development Team [spamassassin.org], or maybe SourceForge.
Parent
Re:Second side to this coin... (Score:4, Interesting)
IronPort's receiver service [bondedsender.org] page.
If you are interested in the rules that bonded senders have to ablige to:
IronPort's sender standards [bondedsender.com] page.
Parent
This isn't as bad as the 'Article' says, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I must say I'm really disappointed in this. Ironport have generally been good guys, but their trust level just plumetted. If you read the sender standards [bondedsender.com] page you'll notice that, while they are at least trying to rule out some of the worst spam, their standards explicitly do allow spam (by diluting the concept of 'consent' to the point it's unverifiable and thus meaningless.) On the other hand, it doesn't sound like they're going to try to adjudicate complaints, just charge a small fee for each one and make judgements based on the sheer number of complaints, so it will be interesting to see how that works out. If enough end-users refuse to tolerate spam, that could effectively keep it out of the whitelist, even though the 'standards' are written to allow it.
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Re:Second side to this coin... (Score:4, Informative)
header RCVD_IN_BONDEDSENDER eval:check_rbl('relay', 'sa.bondedsender.org.')
describe RCVD_IN_BONDEDSENDER Received via a whitelisted Bonded Sender address
score RCVD_IN_BONDEDSENDER +100.000
should work for SpamAssassin 2.2x/2.3x
The +100.000 should ensure they get marked as spam.
Parent
Re:Second side to this coin... (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope that's really what you wanted.
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Re:Second side to this coin... (Score:4, Informative)
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