lioness roaring

Barry Speaks: We won’t shut-up and eat your spam

3 December 2009

Today we have a guest post from the ever popular Barry. Al Iverson, ​Too Much Contact​, Spam Resource (2009), http://www.spamresource.com/2009/10/too-much-contact.html. Barry is overworked, underpaid, and wants to get the word out:

I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter about how ESPs think the ISPs should just shut up and eat their spam. That if the ISPs understood how hard they’re working, and what the ESP’s business model is, that they’d understand, and then shut up and eat their spam. That if the ISPs just had a little heart, and understood that the ESPs are just trying to make a living, they’d shut up and eat their spam.

Here’s something the ESPs probably don’t want to hear: the ISPs understand, but we really don’t CARE. What the we are trying to do is keep our own customers happy by delivering less spam and more wanted mail, and to keep our mail systems from falling over under the load. We’re trying to keep our businesses alive in an increasingly hostile economy, so that maybe our companies have enough money left over at the end of the month to give us a paycheck. We want our customers to be able to use email for all the purposes email was adopted for, without having to wade through endless piles of trash.

Our goals are almost the opposite of the ESP’s goals. The ISPs want less mail. The ESPs want to send more and more mail. Trying to convince the ISPs to shut up and eat their spam by stamping their little tootsies and whining about how hard their jobs are is not going to work. The ISPs have an even harder job that pays less well, and we really have no sympathy for your problems. Clean up your mailing lists and your networks, senders, and you will find that your problems disappear without having to explain your business model for the 473895966578675560909th time to people who have already heard it 473895966578675560908 times.

Mickey Chandler
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