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.
May 31st, 2007 at 2:52 pm
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.
May 31st, 2007 at 2:53 pm
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.