Neil Schwartzman wrote:
Given the huge amount of bumph I've seen and heard about emailreg.org, I
figured it would be an interesting experiment to see if what everybody
feared was happening was true. It isn't. No big extortion plan on the part
of emailreg and Barracuda that I can see.
Neil, I certainly respect what you are saying based on the information you have.
However, I have a fact to toss out about emailreg.org.
I run a small email filtering company with a small cluster of servers for load
balancing and reliability. In early April I found I was unable to send email to
a new customer. They were currently using the Barracuda Networks Reputation
system and it was blocking my emails. I found this somewhat silly considering
we receive over 500 million emails a month but rarely ever SEND email (we only
filter incoming email so far). ie, our outgoing email is mostly just business
correspondence and filter stats reports to our customers.
And then I got to emailreg.org and found that:
1. I could not find out WHY our IPs (we have a block of 32 for the cluster of
servers that my email was being sent from) were being listed
2. I would have to pay a competitor to get off this list and be able to send any
correspondence to anyone using the Barracuda Networks Reputation system.
3. Given how our email system is set up (multiple servers on multiple IPs
supporting many, many domains) I could not even begin to figure out how to fill
out their on-line forms nor how much money it would eventually cost us. In
fact, if we add outgoing filtering to our service, our expense to be "allowed"
to send our customer's valid emails would probably run into the hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
So, in order to do legitimate business filtering spam, not sending it, we must
pay a competitor to let our email reach a new customer? I would not mind so
much if someone would tell us WHY they are blocking our IPs so we could fix
whatever it is. But even that has been denied to us.
I finally gave up and phoned our new customer to explain why they could not get
our emails and we handled setting up their service with us via subsequent phone
calls. And I desperately hope emailreg.org either unblocks our IPs or goes out
of business by the time we start offering outgoing filtering. If not then our
only recourse may be the courts. And NOBODY wins when it gets to that point.
Just wanted you to have ALL the facts when considering emailreg.org.
--
Andy Dorman
Ironic Design, Inc.
AnteSpam.com, HomeFreeMail.com, ComeHome.net
