[petemir]

I worked for a company that sent travel deals newsletters everyday. Deliverability to (then) Hotmail was abysmal.

We then got the recommendation of a company (cannot remember their name) that could analyse our IPs and give recommendations. Naturally, the recommendations were the ones that you could find everywhere so they were not useful, but the company did have access to MSFT's score of our IPs, so we could know when we were close to being blacklisted and could take action/ramp down/etc. How did they have access to those internal IP scores? I don't know, but it seems totally fishy :).

For sure we spent 5k+ USD yearly in this service (which is a huge amount of money in a 3rd. world country), and "somehow" after paying our deliverability did improve, despite doing the same things as before, as the recommendations were not ingenious.

So yeah, e-mail deliverability is a mafia, for sure.

[danpalmer]

Was it "Return Path"? If so, yes, they are just a racket. They ostensibly provide consulting services on this stuff, but in reality they have a (exclusive?) deal with Microsoft to change scores and allowlist, so you just pay them and they get your email through. Pricing is based on volume of email, I think we were paying $10k/yr for our emails to get to Microsoft hosted addresses.

[petemir]

I cannot 100% confirm it but "Return Path" (now Validity) definitely rings a loud bell :), and the figure is also in the ballpark -- we definitely started to send less e-mails just to be able to afford/test them.

I felt outraged at the moment because it was clearly a "pay-to-play" scheme, but ~8 years ago the number of Hotmail/Outlook addresses in my country was definitely substantial. Probably it still is.

[inferiorhuman]

  How did they have access to those internal IP scores?

When I was doing DMARC stuff professionally, plenty of big names were willing to send DMARC reports our way. Microsoft was the only company to give us full text.

[petemir]

Well, you can (and should!) set up your DMARC preferences through your DNS records and enable a mailbox to receive those reports, which you can then use to verify if you have any/some problems with particular providers. This is totally free and standard.

But the score I am speaking of was something different: it was the reputation assigned by Microsoft (i.e., something internal) to the IPs from which we sent e-mails. This score was used to determine how many e-mails sent from those IPs would pass/fail MSFT's filters. And to have access to the score and improve it, we had to pay a 3rd. party :).

[themoonisachees]

in outlook's admin console, there are a few tools related to antispam, including a way to view stats about why or why not a specific email got sent to spam. IIRC it exposes the sender's reputation score among other things.

[Ir0nMan]

>enable a mailbox to receive those reports

Thanks for mentioning this. Have set DMARC preferences in DNS for ages but never configured a mailbox to receive the reports. Will try it out.

[inferiorhuman]

Right. We were a third party to all of that, so I meant full text messages for Microsoft's customers. Even Facebook didn't do that.

[ksjskskskkk]

sounds like you paid to have their spam filter look the other way for your ips