Thanks for coming on board. If you don't mind, I would like to jump right into a early Christmas Eve discussion on the topic :)
Recently I came across a service that was listed in both Bonded Sender as well as Spamhaus, out003.toptx.com - 38.113.200.23. The company, Topica ( http://www.topica.com/ ) is a large list service basically, serving mostly small and medium sized customers that bring their own lists, which of course is problematic despite any verifiable good intentions of the company itself. Their reputation, as well as my first hand experience, has shown them to be a common proliferator of spam from customers that dig search engines and the like for addresses associated with the industry the list owner is targeting. One example that comes to mind in when I started seeing E-mail from their servers directed at almost every car dealership that I am hosting, and it was all sent to their generic E-mail addresses listed on their sites. Their listing in Spamhaus says, "Still hitting loads of addresses that never existed."
It's my feeling that both the listing in Bonded Sender as well as Spamhaus are improper. Spamhaus shouldn't be going after mostly legit companies like this without a better reason than they claim. The issue here is really that any large list service that caters to small and medium sized businesses is going to be plagued by small-time spammers. There's no way that they can effectively stop this either except to take a deposit and enforce standards very strictly, which apparently either isn't happening, or it isn't effective. I have relied on Spamhaus to only list blocks that are run by verifiable spammers, and this service is clearly not dedicated to spam, in fact it came to my attention because we were blocking a list using their service which was sent to paying subscribers.
On the other hand, I have relied on Bonded Sender to heavily credit points to bulk mailers and large volume commercial organizations that can be verified to practice the strictest standards when it comes to managing their lists. Companies like Ebay, Yahoo and Microsoft for instance have taken up the practice of spamming their customers with off-topic and largely unwanted advertisements through default opt-in schemes, and therefore shouldn't be granted Bonded Sender status from the blocks from which they spam from (and I don't believe that has happened). It should also follow that list services such as Topica which are incapable of proactively managing their customer base should be excluded from consideration based simply on the type of business that they are in (you can't guarantee their messages to be legitimate). To me, this is worse than adding an ISP's mail server's to Bonded Sender, because ISP's can't effectively manage the content that is sent through their servers where as there is a concentration of this activity on list services.
So I'm wondering what your take is on the idea of having Topica and possibly other list services on Bonded Sender?
So far, I greatly appreciate all the tools that your company provides with the exception of this one known instance. On the other hand, there's fairly widespread skepticism in the community at large about the dangers of having a larger commercial entity maintaining standards in this way, and I'm sure you are aware of the challenges that presents you.
Thanks and Happy Holidays,
Matt
Cyan Callihan wrote:
Greetings All!
I've been involved in a discussion with Dave Doherty regarding Bonded Sender and he invited me to the Declude list. I hope that I can help address any questions that you may have. If I don't have the answers, I will find someone here who does and we'll help out in any way we can.
I look forward to being part of your community.
Cyan Callihan Bonded Sender Standards and Compliance Manager
IronPort Systems
www.bondedsender.com - Guaranteed Delivery of Legitimate Email www.ironport.com - Email Infrastructure Products and Services www.senderbase.com - The Leading Email Reputation Service www.etcevent.com - Email Technology Conference sponsored by IronPort
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