in a different way.
"E-mail senders have not been able to see or touch their reputation," Habeas's Cahill said. "The actual reputation data is distributed among hundreds of antispam vendors and ISPs."
It would be easier if there was a central database of good mailers as opposed to bad mailers, Tripi noted. However, if one Internet service provider delivers a company's mail, others will likely deliver it too, since practices are similar, he said.
"If your business is based on best practices, and your customers are treated appropriately, the ISPs want to deliver that mail," Tripi said. "They are not going to hold back good mail from their customers if they are confident that the businesses sending that mail are doing the right things."
There is some uniformity in establishing e-mail reputation scores, said George Bilbrey, general manager at ReturnPath. Typically, the score is based on six factors: complaints, percentage of mail sent to nonexistent addresses, number of mail hitting spam traps, response to unsubscribe requests, sending infrastructure and mail volume, he said.
The reputation will be attached to the sender's domain or IP address. Reputation systems may weigh the components differently, depending on their place in the e-mail chain. A spam-filtering appliance or hosted service may give more weight to e-mail volume and patterns, while for an e-mail service provider, the customer complaint rate might be most important.
"Users are voting with their mouse on reputation," said Craig Spiezle, a director at Microsoft, which operates the Hotmail Web e-mail service. "We think that is the best way. It is really in the eyes of the in-box user what is relevant."
But some are troubled by the notion that something set by others--their reputation--can be decisive in whether their e-mail gets delivered. Nicole Hampton, a station production manager at Cox Radio Interactive, worries about the business's reputation being hurt by miscreants abusing Web site mailing features, for example, she said.
Zombies, or computers controlled by outside hackers, pose another threat. An organization could have its systems commandeered and used to send out spam e-mail. This ultimately could affect a company's legitimate e-mail, which may end up being blocked by spam filters, noted Michael Osterman, the head of Osterman Research, which focuses on Internet messaging.
"Reputation filtering is an important component of overall messaging management, but it needs to be combined with other tools to fully protect a network," he said.
Such a hijack of a company's e-mail system is possible, but it probably wouldn't hurt its reputation immediately, Spiezle said, noting that a reputation is established over time.
Checking up
For companies curious about their e-mail reputation,
Habeas and ReturnPath both plan to launch online services that will give them
some insight into it. Beyond that, Habeas charges US$2,500 for a more in-depth
diagnosis, and ReturnPath consultants can be hired for US$5,000 a month to work
with a business and make sure its mail is delivered.
Spam-filtering specialist CipherTrust already offers a Web site, called TrustedSource, that gives some details about its reputation-ranking system. In addition, large e-mail service providers, such as Hotmail, provide a "feedback loop," which lets message senders see the opinion recipients have of them.
One thing that e-mail service providers are looking at is whether it makes sense to share reputation data among ISPs, Microsoft's Spiezle said. Ultimately, he said, providers such as AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft are going to make decisions based on what their users tell them. But pooling information could make reputation data more reliable.
"Sharing best practices and sharing reputation data among major ISPs is some of the discussion that is going on today," Spiezle said.
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