Thursday, June 28, 2007By: J.F. Sullivan, VP Marketing
Just to put this blog in perspective I should confess that I always love seeing Maureen Caplan Grey in print, as she is always insightful and always informed. When reading her recent article entitled, "Will honest mail ever prevail?" she highlighted a need for a definition that still remains unfulfilled.
What *is* the definition of an email reputation?
Much like anti-spam tools in the early days of 2002, the definition of reputation services varies greatly amongst the vendors described in her article. Let's break them down if only to further the discussion - and perhaps stir up a bit of controversy in the process!
First are the reputation services you already know. Anti-spam technologies and edge-of-network solutions that protect you from incoming spam. Many of these solutions are leveraging and/or creating reputation technologies. However, with no intent of malice, one could classify these as "negative reputation" systems. In that, they are observing much of what is "bad" on the Internet and therefore they are able to assess a negative reputation with a variety of senders and sending systems.
A close cousin of these anti-spam systems are the more popular blocklists (colloquially termed blacklists) which identify spammers or senders who look a lot like spammers either by using spam trap email addresses or other creative detection mechanisms. One could say that these are an unadulterated version of negative reputation systems.
In another camp we have the large ISPs who are developing their own proprietary reputation systems - such as the one Hotmail recently announced. These systems are designed around a number of parameters but are HEAVILY weighted towards complaint rates. Hence, while a sender may appear good in all other respects, if complaint rates are too high, the sender will earn a bad reputation and be blocked from the inbox.
On the other hand, the reputation service providers such as Habeas, as well as our e-marketing based counterparts at Return Path, have a more holistic view of reputation. Given that both companies began as public Internet whitelists, they were already complementary approaches to anti-spam and blocklist services. More recently however, we at Habeas see our reputation systems evolving beyond the purely positive, i.e. whitelisting, towards more of an aggregate view of reputation. By observing hundreds of millions of senders daily, their infrastructure, practices, and sending behaviors, we are able to attribute a multi-faceted reputation to a sender that takes into account a whole host of factors.
While we're on the topic of these cottage industries, I am on record as stating that I can certainly understand why some senders would want to invest in Goodmaill to pay for guaranteed email rendering at AOL, Yahoo and four other ISPs. That being said, as a technology, Goodmail Systems has nothing whatsoever to do with reputation systems, services or technologies. Anyone who states otherwise is just trying to include them in conversation for PR...utterly shameless I should think!
Finally, I find that the ESPC and MAAWG, (i.e., the Email Sender and Provider Coalition and Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group ) while certainly furthering the conversation around reputation services, are better characterized as interested bystanders than organizations that are driving standards. For an organization that is truly driving standards, interested parties should check out the Domain Assurance Council which was founded by Habeas, Return Path and Ironport (now Cisco) to drive standardization around reputation information access.
