SPAM filtering where From == To

[James Wilkinson]

Tim wrote:
> And that leads to one of my pet hates about "junk
> mail" buttons on ordinary mail clients used by clueless people.  They'll
> hit the junk button on mail they don't want to see, but isn't actually
> junk (such as a message list that they've subscribed to, but can't arsed
> to unsub themselves), and report that mail as being spam to a third
> party.  And suddenly, your actually not-spam mail, is being blacklisted.

This does have unexpected benefits, though.

Firstly, everyone knows that this is happening. No-one is blocking at an
ISP level on a single “this is spam” click: they’re looking for higher
than usual levels of reporting.

Secondly, some ISPs are turning “this is spam” into unsubscribes for
reliable senders (and they have the data to be able to tell: they look
at how long they’ve been sending from those IP addresses, how much, what
the historic complaint rates have been, and so on). This does confirm
that the account is active, but it also tells the ISP that any more mail
is unwanted: if the senders ignore these unsubscribes, then the ISP
knows that at least part of their output is spam.  So senders who Do The
Right Thing in processing unsubscribes don’t get harmed, and not having
working unsubscribes gets you blocked.

Thirdly, large ISPs (for example, Yahoo), are starting to use
“engagement” as a measure in their email filtering. Depending on the
user agent (for example, web mail), the ISPs may be able to tell for a
large proportion of their userbase which emails are being opened, which
ones are having links clicked, and take a reasonable guess at how long
people are spending reading an email.

Senders with better engagement are the ones that the users really want
to hear from. They might get into “Priority Inboxes”, and are the ones
that can tolerate a higher “this is spam rate”. So there’s another
incentive for senders to send email that the recipients will want to
receive.

For example, under the old system, a marketing department might have
wanted to send out daily fliers during December. Now they might judge
that three or four emails with a higher concentration of good offers
will get better engagement, and hence better delivery.

See, for example,
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/179994/summer-2012-when-engagement-began-to-matter.html#ixzz22oUAyZUo

James.

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