The company said yesterday it will implement Habeas’ email SafeList whitelist system at Hotmail this fall. The deal follows Hotmail’s May 2004 implementation of Bonded Sender, a similar system now owned by Return Path.
Like Bonded Sender, Habeas offers a white-list approach to spam filtering. Volume email senders who have registered their mail transfer agents on the SafeList ensure that their email always gets through to the intended recipients.
Habeas audits these senders before adding them to the list and monitors their adherence to certain practices and standards, to ensure they are not sending illegal spam, so recipients can be more or less positive email they send is legitimate.
Microsoft’s implementation will mean that companies that have their MTAs’ IP addresses listed on SafeList will automatically be able to email Hotmail addresses without fear of the email being filtered as spam.
No money is changing hands as part of the deal. Hotmail gets to use SafeList, which potentially reduces the amount of content scanning and filtering that it needs to perform, and the cost of the infrastructure to support that scanning.
And Habeas gets to brag about having Microsoft as a customer, which will very likely accelerate adoption of its sender-side services, which is where it makes its money.
We talk to many potential customers who are interested in what we do, but are very hesitant, not sure if they should budget for this, Habeas chief executive Des Cahill said. I think this deal will cause a lot of customers to get off the fence.
Hotmail is seen as a leader in this technology space, he said. If these guys are endorsing us, and others, it might cause other ISPs who are maybe a little bit slower to react to consider us too.
Habeas has a modest client base, despite having France Telecom, United Online and Go Daddy as receive-side partners. Cahill said the firm has north of 50 send-side customers, but that Microsoft’s custom means that will grow substantially.
IronPort Systems announced its Bonded Sender was being deployed to Hotmail in May last year, when it had about 100 send-side customers. That had grown to about 300 customers in April this year, when IronPort sold the program to Return Path.
While that’s 200% growth for Bonded Sender, Habeas could see faster adoption. One of the reasons Bonded Sender was sold was that IronPort’s salesforce was focused on revenue-generating efforts, such as sending its high-end email appliances.
Cahill said the business model behind SafeList is somewhat different to Bonded Sender, in which senders pay a bond that is forfeit if they break the rules. IronPort never intended the service to be a big profit driver.
Bonded Sender is more of an economic disincentive punitive model, Cahill said. If we get complaints about a sender, we don’t punish the sender, we try to understand why.
He added that SafeList allows a greater level of granular control for recipients. Rather than just enabling block/permit by sender, recipients can decide to whitelist certain types of emails from permitted senders.
Many companies have their marketing emails and transaction confirmation emails, for example, sent from separate MTAs with unique IP addresses, and SafeList enables recipients to block one and allow the other, if they want to, Cahill said.
Habeas is also planning to today launch a new service, Email Monitor, a portal where volume emailers can view statistics about how their email reputation looks.
The company has established email accounts with many major ISPs. When those addresses are included on mailing lists, Habeas can then report back whether the mails were caught by spam filters or not.
The new service also includes pre-send scanning against SpamAssassin, so clients can see before they mail how spammy their mail looks, and constant monitoring of major IP address spam blacklists, Cahill said.
