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Asking for the Impossible: Send Rates

13 May 2010

Today’s post is the third in a series on contractual terms that clients want to try to get but usually will be unable to due to reality’s harsh impact. Thus far, we have considered Delivery Service Level Agreements (Mickey Chandler, ​Asking For The Impossible: SLAs​, Spamtacular (2010), http://www.spamtacular.com/2010/05/11/asking-for-the-impossible-slas/ (last visited May 13, 2010).) and inbox guarantees (Mickey Chandler, ​Asking For The Impossible: Inbox Guarantees​, Spamtacular (2010), http://www.spamtacular.com/2010/05/12/asking-for-the-impossible-inbox-guarantees/ (last visited May 13, 2010).). Today, we turn our attention to send rate guarantees.

Occasionally a company will try to get an ESP to agree to send rate guarantee. The terms of the contract amendment will usually look something like this:

The ESP will insure that all mail is delivered to the Client’s recipient list within 60 seconds of the time that the Client queues it.

Now, that seems to make some sense. The client thinks that the mail they are sending is important, both to them and perhaps to the recipient. Because of this, they want to see it delivered promptly.

Read moreThe Spock Trap

For some mail, this even makes sense. For instance, Woot.com has some time-sensitive deals on its site. It makes sense that it would want to see its mail delivered well before the deal expires.

So, why do terms like this not fly? Again, it has to do with the reality of the email space. Email is not an instantaneous medium. Things can happen fast, but they don’t have to. Most mail transfer agents (mail servers) are set to stop trying to send mail after three or four days. There is a reason for this default behavior: the reality of the Internet is such that things may take some time to happen.

As we have been mentioning on previous days, there are lots of things that can go wrong. Not everything will mean that a message can never be delivered, but it may mean that it cannot be delivered in the next minute, hour, or even day. Things along this line would include:

  1. Undersea cables are cut. You might remember that in early 2008, this happened to several cables. Ryan Singel, ​UN Official Feeds Cable Cut Sabotage Speculation​, Wired: Threat Level (2008), https://www.wired.com/2008/02/un-official-fee/ (last visited May 25, 2024).
  2. Mail servers are down. The connection cannot go through from time to time because the mail server receiving the email is not receiving any email.
  3. Poor reputation. If a sender has a poor reputation, their messages may be blocked, but they could also get deferred for a period of time, perhaps even until off-peak hours for the receiving server.
  4. Technical issues. A post from the AOL Postmaster Blog points out that a server may not be down, but still may not be receiving mail at expected rates. Margot Romery, ​Internet Inbound Mail Delay​, AOL Postmaster Blog (2010), https://web.archive.org/web/20121031084912/http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2010/04/27/internet-inbound-mail-delay/ (last visited May 25, 2024).
  5. Rate limiting. Some ISPs use rate limits to help make certain that things do not get backed up too much on their systems. This may be tied to poor reputation, but does not have to be.
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There are, of course, other things that could contribute to not being able to send all of the mail you want to send as fast as you want to send it. But, all of these things combined mean that it is unrealistic to expect an ESP to agree to send mail with anything other than “best effort.”

Mickey Chandler
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