IronPort’s program, partially administered by privacy watchdog TRUSTe, certifies bulk email senders who put up a financial bond, pay an annual license fee, and agree to abide by certain email sending practices.
Microsoft will use the DNS-based white-list generated by this program to ensure that email sent by trusted mailers makes its way all the way through to its users inboxes, bypassing spam filters that sometimes throw up false positives.
It’s a no-cash deal, IronPort CEO Scott Weiss, who used to work at Hotmail, told ComputerWire. Microsoft gets to reduce the support costs involved in resolving false positive problems, and IronPort gets much-needed receiver-side traction.
The program has suffered from a chicken and egg situation in the past, Weiss said. Senders were reluctant to pay without guarantees that receivers would acknowledge the Bonded Sender list, and receivers saw little value in using an empty whitelist.
The bond was always a part of the program, but it was tough to get people to put bonds up if we didn’t have a big receiver footprint, said Weiss. The Microsoft deal, he said, gives IronPort the critical mass to attract more Bonded Sender participants.
IronPort’s primary business is in making high-volume email appliances, used by companies that send and receive large quantities of email and value performance. Customers include CNN, PayPal, and Nasdaq.
The Bonded Sender program came about because IronPort often found itself caught between senders and receivers, having to figure out what went wrong when email got blocked by ISPs before it could reach user desktops.
Messages were ending up in bulk or trash folders, and then we’d get these calls from MTV, which is a customer, saying our messages are not getting through to AOL, so we’d have to call AOL, said Weiss.
Weiss dismissed criticisms, leveled by some privacy advocates yesterday, that the deal shows Microsoft putting the interests of direct marketers before the interests of its users. Microsoft is just outsourcing what they already do themselves, he said.
All these guys – Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo – are competing with each on quality of service, and customers don’t like spam, he said. Microsoft might be cutting support costs, but will not see any revenue from this deal.
Indeed, Weiss said Bonded Sender was never meant to be a profitable business. It’s just meant to break even and help solve the false positive problem, he said. Non-profits can get the service for free, and prices for commercial outfits are based on volume.
The rules about sending that Bonded Senders have to stick to are in some respects stronger than the US’s four-month-old CAN-SPAM Act, specifically in the respect that they do not advocate an opt-out regime.
Five different levels of opt-in are acceptable under the program, the most lenient of which is preselected opt-in, which means the recipient did not uncheck an opt-in box when they originally handed over their email address.
In all cases, unsubscribe options must be included in each email. Third parties who did not originally collect the address are allowed to rent email lists but must do due diligence to ensure the rules about opt-in were followed.
It’s kind of like a moron trap for spammers, said Weiss. If they try to become a Bonded Sender, they either get rejected or get thrown out after they are spotted spamming. Either way they lose their money.
He added that IronPort will keep an eye out for people trying to game the system. I’m sure this system will have its perimeters tested to the limit, he said. Because it is a road right into the in-box.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
