[Source: ldrlongdistancerider[dot]com/02 ] Euphemistically packaged and sold to the American Sheeple as a “spam filter”, Cloudmark Authority is actually the email censorship software of choice in Communist China: tinyurl[dot]com/yb3vhx7

Here in the United States, that same censorship system is installed on the email servers of many of our largest telecoms, internet service providers (ISPs), social networks and web hosting companies, including Network Solutions: cloudmark[dot]com/en/serviceproviders/

Shortly after Network Solutions implemented Cloudmark Authority in late 2009, we and other Network Solutions clients became victims of its sinister Big Brother capabilities: tinyurl[dot]com/Defy-Cloudmark-Authority

Since that time, we’ve experienced a regular pattern (see below) by which legitimate political email communications have either been blocked from being sent via SMTP, or blocked from being received via webmail or POP, or we have been blocked from receiving replies to those emails, or all of the above. In some cases, after multiple complaints, we have been able to get those blocks lifted. But in some cases, blocks that were lifted were eventually reactivated, even after we were assured by Network Solutions that such a thing “would not happen”.

Ironically, the number of unsolicited commercial emails (U.C.E. or “spam”) delivered to our inboxes by Network Solutions has increased rather than decreased since they installed Cloudmark Authority (see below). So although our 1984-ish experiences validate Cloudmark Authority as a great censorship tool for Big Brother, as a spam blocker, spam filter or weapon against “messaging abuse”, it’s a bust.

Do you have any other hosting sites that provide an email address that you can recommend me? (and if you don’t hear back from an email – assume it is because I did not receive it!)

They really shouldn’t have to pay a 3rd party Email service provider to do that and to be forced into a per email or additional monthly cost to communicate with their customers.

I completely understand that it is not the intent of Network Solutions or ISPs to make life miserable for legitimate senders, but the reality is that overly robust antispam filters and stringent limitations set by domain server hosts and ISPs are not making life easy for small businesses. At the same time, those same tactics do little to dissuade the main spam gangs from sending spam.

It’s a difficult balance for sure, but I think we should err on the side of reliability for customers rather than spam protection. Worst case scenario if some spam gets through is that recipients have to delete it. Worst case scenario in having overly robust filters to keep spam out is that small businesses lose business because their emails aren’t getting delivered or emails to them are not arriving.

As a disclaimer, I work with Infacta, developers of GroupMail, and so I am coming at this from the side of our customers who chose not to go the ESP route and are trying to manage delivery themselves. I am constantly looking for good solutions for our customers, who predominantly send to small lists of less than 10,000.

I think the advice to the customer to use a professional email marketing service was to keep their benefit in mind. We have higher levels of email capability in our solution and often customers move to a email marketing solution when their needs grow. Feedback from our customers is useful and very welcome and we have many avenues for that feedback some of which is in the posts above. We sorted out most of the hiccups with the new Cloudmark service. The Network Solutions team also monitors blogs and twitter to reach out and help customers.

Thanks,

Shashi Bellamkonda