Re: emailreg.org - pretty good white list

[Marc Perkel]

Rob McEwen wrote: Marc Perkel wrote: I see no reason that everything has to be free. Ultimately we all have to eat and we do something to make a living. There are people in the world who are both ethical and financially successful. So if someone is doing something right and making a buck at it I don't have a problem with that. I agree 100%. But that is not really the issue here. The issue has more to do with how to set up those business models such that good behavior on the part of the whitelist maintainer is 'incentivized' and bad behavior by the whitelist maintainer is 'disincentivized'. Therefore, generally speaking, it is at least very difficult for any whitelist which involves payment-then-removal to be a highly ethical operation, imo. Not saying it can't be done, but this is not normally how pay-for-removal works out. Return Path's certification program is probably one of the best examples of this working out, but that is mostly because (a) Return Path has sufficient # of high-end and ethical customers such that they are 'incentivized' to dump any low-quality customer that comes along so as to not sully their reputation with their high profile customers, and (b) Return Path's whitelist is more valuable if used by more spam filters--and they lose THAT market share if they allow mainsleaze spammers on their whitelist. These two things provide incentives for Return Path to run an ethical list. Obviously, Return Path and emailreg.org have very different business models, but I haven't heard very much similar reasoning for how/why emailreg.org is also properly 'incentivized' for good behavior other than "trust us", "$20 isn't much money", "we promise, we remove spammers", and they do have some good hoops that prospective customers must jump through (proper rDNS, etc). But, as I said, I highly trust my well-placed contact who vouches for emailreg.org, so I'm satisfied. My main point--yes, having revenue is NOT a bad thing--but that doesn't mean that certain business models for various whitelist/blacklists don't sometimes 'incentivized' bad behavior--and when it LOOKS like it is happening, I think the anti-spam community SHOULD ask questions! My opinion is that when you look at the income Barracuda gets from it's spam filtering appliances and contracts I'm guessing that emailreg is not a significant amount of money. So I'm thinking they are either just covering their costs or it is sort of a captcha. It's interesting as to what companies get what passes. There's big evil Microsoft who is looked at as the bad guy. But in the early 1990s MS was the little guy up against big evil IBM who was the bad guy. The Apple seems to get a pass when they are claiming ownership of anything that is remotely similar to an iPhone and will turn your phone into a brick if they want to. But we all like Google and we all hope they will never turn into evil Google.