[jt2190]

  > Provide a good user experience, and you'll build a good
  > reputation. Push the limits (for example, use a "pre 
  > checked" checkbox on an order confirmation page to put 
  > people on your sales mailing list) and you'll be putting 
  > out email delivery fires all of the time.

Believe it or not, it's possible to be a good actor, follow all of the rules and best practices, and still get flagged as spam.

Mail recipients are not perfect. They forget that they signed up for things. They accidentally click the "spam" flag on their messages. They get lazy and instead of unsubscribing they click the spam flag.

The real culprit here is that email messages rely on blacklists and not whitelists, i.e. recipients are required to give all senders full access and then block them when they misbehave, instead of giving them no access and giving them more access as they build trust.

So: What would it take to implement email whitelists across the industry?

[davideous]

Yes, good senders will still get messages flagged as spam. But the ISPs know this and they look at the complaint ratio. A complaint ratio of 0.5% or 1.0% is considered good. A complaint ratio of 3.0% is a problem.

We have one customer that's cleanest-of-the-clean (confirmed opt-in, valuable content, solid brand) sending 600k emails/day, and we see hundreds of spam reports. But their email gets delivered to the Inbox.

If you're a good actor with a solid technical setup you're still going to have an occasional delivery problem. This is why monitoring is so crucial. But you're not going to be putting out fires left-and-right, which is what it sounded like what _asciiker_ was saying he is doing.

[jt2190]

True, but _asciiker_ was also saying this:

  > Conclusion: There is no common standard because every 
  > major ISP can set their own standards. This will 
  > eventually force everyone to use the same services 
  > worldwide.
  > 
  > Where's the freedom of choice [of ESP] here?

My point being that the current blacklist-based system is broken from a "freedom of choice" perspective. The current system favors the established ESPs, as the cost of doing it yourself gets larger and larger.

[x0x0]

davideos' point, though:

email users want and expect