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Extortion via Sender Score Certified

Microsoft has a spam filter that once it thinks you’re a spammer will pretty much never allow you to send legitimate emails. For any internet based company, emails are critical to the operation and need to get through or there’s no business. Microsoft has developed an approach through Sender Score Certified where they’ll let you pay them to be whitelisted. Its pretty much the only way I found to get off their shit list. The cost is about $1500 in all and has taken me 3 months or so to complete. The whole process was a big run around over and over sending me to different people and sites to do silly tasks. People rarely responded to any emails or phone calls I made and I had all but given up on it when they finally responded with a few minor changes I needed to make to our site in order to complete the process. Email has always been a free thing to deliver. It seems to me that Microsoft has found a way to capitalize on the fact that online companies must be able to send emails by forcing them to pay to get added to their whitelist. Basically, if too many people click on this is spam then you’re learned as spam and you’re screwed. You’ve got to pay to get whitelisted at that point. Sucks for online companies but its a great, albeit sleazy, business strategy for Microsoft to make some extra cash.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 1:28 pm and is filed under marketing, Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • http://www.brianmcquay.com admin

    I got an email from Sender Certified addressing my concerns. Here is what they had to say:
    =====================================
    Brian,

    I caught your blog post this morning regarding your Sender Score
    Certified application and experience:

    http://www.brianmcquay.com/extortion-via-sender-score-certified/89

    I wanted to follow up with you to ensure we acknowledge your thoughts
    and concerns about your experience.

    Based on some points in your post, I wanted to clarify a few things.
    Microsoft does choose to use our whitelist as a factor for delivery into
    their network. Microsoft does not receive any money from Return Path or
    Sender Score Certified with regard to referrals, or SSC license or
    application fees. Our whitelist is publicly available in DNS to anyone,
    free of charge. In fact many other receivers and filtering companies
    like Spam Assassin reference the list as well.

    Reviewing your application and evaluation, I do not see that any major
    issues arose during our review. It appears that the amount of time it
    took to perform your evaluation was probably most concerning to you. We
    have found that our program is getting more popular and our ability to
    respond to applications quickly has been a growing challenge for us.
    Additionally, since Microsoft does choose to use the list as part of
    their system, they do make referrals to us of senders having trouble
    with deliverability into their system. We have been working with their
    support teams to better manage these referrals to ensure timely
    processing.

    There are many organizations relying on our whitelist for delivery into
    their networks (and again, none of them pay us or receive any funds from
    us) and we take our application reviews very seriously. We work from
    our application queue in a “first in, first out” manner. At the time of
    your application, there was a sizable number of applications ahead of
    yours. We recognize this pipeline issue on our side and are in the
    process of hiring additional member services representatives to ensure
    that we can handle applications in a more consistent and timely fashion.

    I am very sorry for the delay in picking up and processing your
    application – it seems at a minimum some additional communication from
    our representatives would have been helpful. I will address that with
    our team.

    Again, I appreciate your feedback – we are very open to hearing about
    our customer experiences and how we can improve. Please feel free to
    communicate directly with me on concerns you have.

  • http://www.brianmcquay.com admin

    I’m glad they sent this email to me. The process left a bad taste in my mouth. I feel like the email gave it a more personal touch and clarified a few things for me.

  • http://blog.whitesites.com Houston NightClubs

    I have been searching for reviews on Sender Score, and if it actually makes a difference. It would seem they have dedicated a lot of resources to ensuring there is nothing in the way of negative reviews on the web, as your blog was the closest thing I could find.

    Other than the process of joining senderscore. Did you notice any difference in your open rates? Especially Yahoo? If you can’t post your true thoughts here, feel free to email me directly. I have quite a few clients that are considering senderscore. But so far everything we have found online, is nothing more than bought and paid reviews.

  • http://www.brianmcquay.com admin

    It has been some time since I’ve dealt with this but if you’re client’s aren’t already blacklisted and emails are getting through fine then there’s no need to do the Microsoft Sender Score nonsense. If you’re flagged then there really is no way around it. Its the only way to get your emails sent without being flagged as spam other than pay them. It was extortion then and its extortion now. I don’t think Yahoo was using Sender Score when I originally did this so I can’t say. As for emails not being flagged as spam, they went through fine as soon as we paid them and everything was setup. I did like the interface they had showing the numbers of people who marked our emails as spam. We were emailing people who opted into our mailings after purchasing something from us. To have to pay money to send emails to those people is clearly immoral and probably illegal (extortion/monopoly) if you had the resources to fight it that far of course. In the end, if you’re blacklisted by Microsoft and your business relies on sending emails to your clients who use the same blacklist then the only way around it is to pay up. No wonder they can’t seem to figure out how to succeed online.