Skip Parker wrote:
What does "Security Compliance" mean?
An informal idea which would need to be formalized. Along the lines of, Must be a server on its own IP address, Not behind a NAT solution. Must not be open relay etc
This opens such a can of worms it's not funny, quite frankly, I'd drop this one in favor of 'not listed in any of the common Blacklists' [snippage about message rates]
What does your company do? Are you an IT provider, or some kind of hosting provider?
IT Consulting, however I also head up the Network Operations for a Broadcaster (Rhema Broadcasting Group), who is keen to extend its Internet presence, and so were exploring ways of doing this without annoying the heck out of ISP's
Why worry about the ISP's ? It's really the cusomers that you need to 'not piss off' and the way you do that is quite simple really. Make sure you have customers on your lists that (and this next bit is the killer here) actually signed up on these lists. This is really common sense when running any mailing list and is not terribly hard to do properly, I mean, look at this list as an example, I highly doubt that the University of Waikato gets too many complaints about 'NZ Network Operators Spamming Me !!!111!!!' and if they did I'm pretty sure that said person would be removed without too many issues or ISP's trying to blacklist the University mailing lists. If you follow some basic guidelines then no one really minds being on a mailing list, be up front, honest, provide easy to follow and use directions for removal and prove yourself to be trustworthy in this reguard and you wont have any issues, oh, and an _obviously_ confirmed opt in (not to use or be confused with the spammer term, 'double opt in') will also get you a load of respect from the ISP's in question - infact, if you went one further and kept copies of the e-mail confirmations, dates of confirmation and the like and made this available when faced with a complaint I don't think you will ever run foul of anyone (privacy laws would obviously need to be followed here)
What were the suggestions made to you, and why were you not able to meet them?
We have implemented a number of suggestions from various ISP, however there are a few who just plain don't want to talk to us, making it hard to adhere to what ever policies they have. The last one we talked to suggested they wont speak to us as we were not a customer and that we needed to get their customers to call us.. Which seems a little ludicrous, some of our subscribers are 75 year old ladies who barely know how to surf, imagine the chaos of getting them to discuss SMTP Etiquette.
See, and that's a really good way to avoid answering the question completely and this makes me look at your entire operation with an immediate suspicion. Nathan asked a really simple question, you answered it with "there were some suggestions" and then ran off on a tangent about little old ladies. If you are trying to be above board then be honest and answer the question, we cannot help you if you don't let us. -- Steve () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments