Hello, Normally I wouldn't jump in on a technical mailing list such as this, but I was pointed to the archives by someone on the list and saw that someone was asking specific questions on how we operate. I hope I can clear up some stuff and answer any questions.
We are an ESP. We have over 250,000 customers. We cater mostly to small businesses and non-profits. The majority of our customers are businesses or organizations with less than 5 employees who don't have an IT or a marketing department. Our product is a do-it yourself type thing with lots of online help. despite the large numbers we do a lot to vet our customers. They are required to have permission, but the real test is how we enforce that. We do a lot at list upload time before they ever mail, scanning lists for things that would indicate it isn't permission based. We have a large database of spamtraps (donated mostly by anti-spammers), and we also look for things such as role addresses. There is more but I can't give away the whole secret sauce for obvious reasons. After an automated review there is usually a "list review" on the phone with a human in our call center. There customers are required to explain how they have permission to mail etc. If someone makes it through that we then rely on spam complaints after they mail. We are signed up for all feedbackloops available and also get plenty of direct abuse@ complaints as well. We terminate many customers every day, most of them before they ever mail. Most of the people who are bumped from our system are not your average malicous spammers but businesses who were misled, misinformed, or are just plain lacking in clue. We educate those we can and terminate the rest. We do have the occasional outright malicious spammer and we are constantly tweaking our automated upload checks to improve them. As for the whitelisting mentioned in this thread, we are aware of it and in both cases (barracuda and SA skipcheck) we found out after the fact and I can confirm no money changed hands. We work closely with Barracuda when they get spam complaints from their customers regarding us, the decision to whitelist us was theirs alone but it seems it was due to user feedback. When their product would occasionally block our mail their users would complain much louder. If anyone has spam from us they'd like our compliance group to look at I can send it over, please feel free to send it to me and I'll see what I can share with you about the outcome. You can always send to abuse@ but will likely not get anything more than the auto-ack. I'm sorry for the intrusion on your list and I don't want this to get too off topic so please feel free to reply to me off list. Tara Natanson Constant Contact Mail Operations tnatan...@constantcontact.com
