Cleaning up a bad email reputation

About a year ago, Publishers Clearing House set out to make sure its email reputation was squeaky-clean.

The company, known for its sweepstakes and magazine subscription promos, stepped up its efforts to be a good email citizen, and to make sure it didn't send out unwanted messages. It developed its own tools. It hired outside consultants. It signed up two full-time employees to oversee all of its email delivery.

Quite an investment of time and money — but worth it, if it meant the company, which relies on mail to do business, avoided having its messages junked by spam filters.

"It has become more of a challenge to send email," Sal Tripi, the director of operations at Port Washington, New York-based Publishers Clearing House, said in an interview. "Because the ISPs are taking certain actions to catch illegitimate mailers, legitimate mailers have to take action to make sure that they are not caught in the same net."

In reputation-based filtering, senders are graded on their practices and assigned a reputation score based on several variables, such as complaint rates, volume of mail sent and response to unsubscribe requests. It's one of the latest techniques used to combat the problem of spam, which makes up more than 80 percent of all messages sent today, according to email security service Postini.

Also in response to spam, email service providers are aggressively filtering messages to keep the medium useful for their customers. That, allied to the reputation push, is putting a burden on companies to meet the requirements of those providers. If they don't, they risk a slur on their character — and a subsequent ding to their business.

"It is a consistent and ever-changing business challenge to keep abreast of changing ISPs, policies and filtering," said Heather Soule, a representative of online invitation service Evite. "We adhere to the policies that most spam filters recognise, like proper formatting, and test through Habeas to ensure that the emails are delivered to our users' in-boxes and not junk/spam or bulk boxes. It is a laborious, constant challenge."

As a result, email is no longer an easy and cheap way to get messages out to a large number of people, but one that needs careful management.

The score
Habeas, a Mountain View, California company, is a reputation-filtering service that also offers to help companies fix their email reputation — for a price. Companies such as WalMart.com, Staples, Vanguard, Geico and Tickets.com have hired its services, Habeas said. One rival, which also specialises in getting mail delivered to the in-box, not the junk mail folder, is New York-based ReturnPath.

"Email is everything but free. Nothing good can remain free," Habeas chief executive Des Cahill said. "Just like everyone spends money on search engine optimisation, email reputation and delivery is fast emerging as an industry."

Industry experts liken an email reputation to a driving record or a credit score. With a bad driving record, you pay more in insurance premiums. With a low credit score, you don't get good rates on loans. If your email reputation is bad, your mail gets junked.

"We monitor our reputation on a daily basis," Tripi, of Publishers Clearing House, said. "We like to make sure that our reputation remains clean, but it is a big effort."

But if you have a credit score problem, you really only need to hit the three agencies that maintain those records. It's a lot tougher for businesses that want to set their email reputation straight: Hundreds of places compute email reputations, and they may all do it in a different way.

"Email senders have not been able to see or touch their reputation," Habeas's Cahill said. "The actual reputation data is distributed among hundreds of antispam vendors and ISPs."

It would be easier if there was a central database of good mailers as opposed to bad mailers, Tripi noted. However, if one Internet service provider delivers a company's mail, others will likely deliver it too, since practices are similar, he said.

"If your business is based on best practices, and your customers are treated appropriately, the ISPs want to deliver that mail," Tripi said. "They are not going to hold back good...