CONCLUSIONS: I predict that any large scale high quality reputation system will offer limited functionality free access with clear value distinctions for upgrading to fee based services. I also suggest  financial support for individuals who currently donate their daily "email research" time to the community will be money well-spent by reputation system Aggregators.

I expect to see financially rewarding opportunities opening up in the near future for individual anti-spam researchers who are paid for access to their daily "Reputation Collection" work yet remain independent rather than being "bought" as an employee for just one anti-spam service firm.



No, I'm not talking about myself - I consider my work in the area of aggregating, not Repuation Collecting nor making "judgements." I'm thinking more of people like Steve Linford, Catherine Hampton, Jeff Chan, Joe Wein, and lots of other folks doing small pieces like Karsten M Self. I see each of these people making a greater contribution worldwide as independent "researchers" than would occur if their personal drive and vision became proprietized by a single anti-spam service for competitive advantage. Yes, some already have their own companies or software but in general they are making their work widely available to benefit nearly all.

The present day reputation collectors I'm aware of today fall into two categories: Pay to get listed, free to query or free to get listed, pay to query.

"Pay to get listed" such as Bonded Sender, IADB and Habeas (with a twist) have a natural sender bias yet to have value for their sender/customers they must keep a "good enough" standard of value to recipients. (And in my opinion they do.)

"Pay to query" services have a natural recipient bias or in some cases an ISP bias.

A second-cousin-once-removed cousin to "Pay to get listed" may be a service such as ReturnPath's SenderScore, where the company derives revenue for deliverability consulting for large senders, but the reputation query service they operate will give an answer for all senders, not just their clients. ClickZ's article on Sender Score explains that senders can check their score for free but to find out exactly what they are doing wrong (assumedly if their score is not good) and how to fix it will entail a subscription fee from  $1000 to $20000 a month depending on volume and complexity.

I'm going to throw out another possible business model - as a sender, it's your choice within the same listing service if you prefer:

 - you get a free listing and recipient ISPs will have to pay for query responses about emails purporting to be from your domain or server

OR

 - what you pay for your listing can be applied to provide a certain number of queries about your domain and servers free for the recipient ISPs

This could lower the cost or provide some level of free querying or a mixture of free and fee based listing / querying. Theoretically everyone could be happy and everyone could have an option - unless of course you are "pest-a-mistic" as my son sometimes calls me ;)

While some folks jump up and start screaming about never paying for reputation services - "blacklists are free" - or never paying "cents per email" - I suggest that the costs for reputation data about email will wind up closer to 50 cents a year per user than any measurable amount per message, and I'm going to predict that the 50 cents will go to cover all levels of infrastructure and people hours to do human-verified Reputation Collection as well as delivering the data through Reputation Aggregators.

I suggest that the most common "reputation" systems of the past ten years have been blacklists. The majority have been available to low volume users without charge by anonymous access and have been supported by the intelligent large corporations who know good cost efficient work when they see it.

A few (including MAPS and Spamhaus) put into writing a policy that all commercial users must pay for their service. Anecdotally, there are still commercial users who are not paying  -  but at least the policy is out there.

However, according to Spamhaus, paying customers get priority access to data which could take many hours to trickle down to free mirrors. I see real value in having the more frequently updated data to prevent or stop "spam in progress."

I expect (and hope) that companies who benefit from the fine work of balanced email researchers are proactively sponsoring and supporting companies like Spamhaus and SURBL. I'd like to interview ten or so researchers who appear to be contributing large amounts of their time for the greater good and find out how and why they do it.

 - Employer absorbs the cost of their time and bandwidth?

 - A few large sponsors?

 - Just donating all their time and energy?

 - Spreading out the cost through mirrors?

More than one blacklist operator has burned out and shut down just from the sheer weight of having no time for a life beyond tracking bad guys, adding to their list, and the time consuming responses to remove requests and research needed to avoid mistakes in either direction.

I don't want to see this happen to any of the good hard-working people we have out there benefitting the Internet community today. Consider clicking the Donate button, folks. (No, not MINE - the ones running those services you are using!)

And let me hear comments from my fellow authors and others - where was I way offbase or right on? What are you thinking right now?