Fighting Spam: Marketers and ISP’s Take a New Look

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), an industry group made to address messaging abuse and work to fight against spam, DDoS attacks and other types of cybercrimes involving email, has released version 2.0 of its Senders Best Communications Practices (BCP), which defines how bulk email senders can insure that their newsletters and other opt in marketing emails don’t get caught in spam filters and blacklists. The BCP was updated to cover new forms of spam and add further clarification of permission options and is available at the MAAWG website.  It also included guidelines to help legitimate email from being flagged as spam and recommend unsubscription procedures for users.

          “The MAAWG senders best practices are intended to help protect users’ online experience by improving industry cooperation and communication. For example, in this update we advise e-marketers not to embed unsubscribe instructions in an image or icon, as many users’ systems will automatically block the message or not display the icon,” MAAWG senders committee co-chair Dennis Dayman said.

The BCP also includes this questionnaire designed to help marketers open a dialogue with an potential Email Sender Provider:

• Do you incorporate and comply with public AUPs?
• Do you provide dedicated IPs?
• Do you provide a dedicated IP for each type of message stream (marketing vs. transactional)?
• Do you match forward and reverse lookups for your IPs?
• Which methods of authentication do you support and provide?
• Which ISPs are you whitelisted with?
• Which ISPs have you established a feedback loop with?
• Do you distinguish between hard and soft bounces?
• What is your hard bounce policy?
• What is your soft bounce policy?
• What is your standard retry policy for soft bounces?
• How do you handle connection timeouts?

The questions are designed to help marketers establish a provider’s conformance with the BCP and avoid potential delivery issues.

The practices were developed through a co-operative effort with the industry’s largest ISPs, vendors and network operators and are endorsed by other associations like CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email). It members include AOL, Earthlink, Comcast, Yahoo!, and more.