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.