Thursday, May 3, 2007By: J.F. Sullivan, VP Marketing
Recently, a customer of ours had to be suspended. They were suspended because they appeared on the ROKSO blacklist. For those of you who don't know what this blacklist is, suffice to say, it's the kiss of death in the email delivery circle. Essentially, appearance on this list means that the sender as been officially blocked by at least three (and counting) ISPs having been, in their measurements, identified as a spammer. The policies that guide this kind of transgression dictate that the customer would be suspended for a long, long time. How long you ask? The suspension would be a minimum of six months from the point that contact has been established as fixing whatever problem lead to the listing.
Holy Unspam Batman!
As it turns out the reason that they were identified as a spammer was because - drum roll please - they had decided to no longer use a range of IPs that they had traditionally used to send email. These IPs were no longer under their control so the real Spammers, opportunistic predators that they are, almost immediately co-opted these IP addresses. The Spammers then them to generate an armada of spam messages before the customer in question was locked down. The customer was locked down because the IP addresses were associated with them for so long that those IPs were now part of their reputation profile. Unfortunately, practices such as this are becoming more and more commonplace.
Not to go off on a rant here but it sure seems like this is, yet another, classic example of folks not monitoring their reputation at all times. Perhaps, it's an even better example of folks not keeping in mind what goes into a reputation. We all know that the complaints and sending behavior are elements of your online reputation but consider that, at least in this example, neither complaints nor sending behavior is directly attributable to the customer in question. What happened was a combination of forgetfulness, non-automated processes and identity theft. The net effect was the catastrophic listing on ROKSO.
So could reputation monitoring have absolutely prevented this situation? Perhaps not, but certainly putting instrumentation in place which keeps track of your IPs and domains is a start. Also, services which alert you of impending problems either with your servers as well as your ISP blocking issues would be good idea. Finally, perhaps a dashboard that continuously updates the various activities of the Internet that affect your reputation, and just what is going into your reputation, would useful as well.
Point is, do not take this noise about reputation monitoring lightly, the bite is much worse than the bark!
