50 minutes into the deliverability panel (thankfully) the Big Question came from the audience. "Why isn't there one set of rules for deliverability instead of as many sets of rules as their are
receivers." (Insert applause) Miles Libbey of Yahoo! says that it's a nice idea, but there is no interest on the part of the Receivers to dictate how email marketing should work - and one set of
standards would indeed crimp marketers' style. He says we all have to work together toward our common goal of serving subscribers. Craig Speizle of Microsoft gets the quote of day, "If Miles
would just agree with me more often, we could do this." Craig pointed to the many shared best practices today, but says "Hey, it's a great lofty goal to have one standard but it's not realistic."
Reputation is defined very similarly by all receivers and that helps senders. Craig says Sender Reputation at Hotmail/MSN is based on what his users say, and he has to listen to his subscribers and
not those of other ISPs. And each of the ISPs have unique threats and unique infrastructure, so the practices and thresholds are unique. Thanks to the panel for answering so frankly, but it's an
answer that is wholly unsatisfying to senders who feel they are deep in the plumbing of sending email rather than focusing on marketing. In fact, the receivers are already doing a lot to help
marketers with feedback loops and published data streams that can be quickly aggregated into a dashboard. Perhaps one day we'll agree on authentication standards and merge domain keys and Sender ID.
One new tool for marketers from Craig: MSFT's whitepaper on deliverability is on their website www.microsoft.com/postmaster
