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by davideous 4438 days ago
> As an e-mail services provider, I cannot or should inspect what my customers are sending. I can suspend them due to complaints of abuse but the damage is already done.

As an ESP, since you are letting customers send through your IP space, then a bad-apple can hurt the delivery of your other clients.

This is one of the big jobs that an ESP has. MailChimp, for example, has invested a ton of effort into detecting bad-apples as early as possible. (There are some really neat big-data techniques.) This is also why SES requires that you start with a smaller quota and build-up.

Some techniques:

* manually reviewing new clients before they send

* giving a new client a limited sending quota, so they build reputation with you over some time

* detect clients/campaigns with high complaints, high bounces, or low opens and take compliance action

* detect a partially-sent campaign with a high bounce rate and suspend it

* don't give any client an unlimited sending quota, so they can't hurt you too badly

> I still say, block domain names, not IPs..

There's a minimum amount of mail volume required to build a reputation. Many of your clients might not have this so they benefit from being lumped-in on an IP reputation.

I don't think IP blocking will ever go away, as it's an effective technique. The threat of an IP block also places some reasonable pressure on ESPs to police their client base.