How does UniSender antispam work?

Like the email newsletter service, UniSender is at the forefront of the fight against spammers - those who want to take advantage of our opportunities to send spam appear regularly, and we also regularly have to sift them out - strangling, one can say, in the bud, blocking spamming accounts and attempts of illegal mailings. This is, in fact, a big job. We will describe how UniSender antispam works in this article.

The main differences between email marketing and spammer

To begin with, once again dot the i's and define our notions and those of others. Spammers are distinguished by three features:

1. They buy the base instead of collecting it honestly and independently, offering customers to subscribe to what they are interested in and not giving the opportunity to choose the option “not to subscribe”.
2. They send what they did not ask for, when they do not wait for it, to those who did not ask for it.
3. On their mailing should be a negative reaction: many unsubscribe and put it in place - that is, in spam. And sometimes they complain directly to us .
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Moderation mailing database

The first serious filter in the way of unwanted mailings is the mandatory manual moderation of the mailing list. We have our own system, which includes a set of certain markers, which identifies suspicious addresses that compromise the base. If the address list of the client does not cause suspicion, then it is activated. This is done fairly quickly, so the speed of the "honest worker" does not affect.

If there are any questions or suspicions, the support contacts the client, asks questions about the sources of the downloaded addresses, asks for data confirming the legality of their receipt. It is possible that we remove addresses from gray sources from the database, but skip white ones.

Even if the database of downloaded addresses did not cause suspicion and was activated, this does not mean that the spammer can safely do his dirty work. In this case, UniSender has a second line of defense: moderation of direct mailings. Most mailings from trusted users go away automatically. However, those mailings that seem suspicious get checked.

First of all, we check mailings where there are new addresses, as well as mailings that are unexpectedly larger than this user is used to sending - in search of “laid mines”.

We have two internal indicators that affect moderation - the conditional automatically calculated "karma" of the user, based on the ratio of successfully delivered, read letters, letters with transitions and the number of formal replies / complaints about spam. And manually set the level of "trust" to the user, which our experts have already put on the basis of an informal analysis.

If we receive complaints from our clients about unsolicited mailing, we “hang up” the account and expect explanations from the distribution agent - what caused the customers to be dissatisfied. It will be impossible to continue the mailing until all the reasons are clarified.

Work with mail providers

With large providers that have FBL, UniSender has established automatic processing of FBL (mail.ru, AOL, Yahoo, hotmail): we are the first to know when the user clicks “This is spam” and analyze this information. In this case, the newsletter can automatically stop before it reaches the end. When analyzing the following mailings, moderators will see that such facts were in the sender's history, and this affects the karma of our client, as well as the decision of our moderators.

It happens that sending out a completely respectable customer as a result of mistakes made by the sender turns out to be undesirable - to do this, it’s enough to break just a few rules of legal sending. However, in this case, the pre-moderation of mailings will play a positive role: an inaccurate newsletter can be intercepted in the process - thus protecting the customer base of our users, because if the recipients started to complain and unsubscribe, then continuing such a newsletter means “to kill” your base. In this case, our technical support will inform the marketer about the situation and help with advice.

Spam - will not pass

When our moderators detect spam, the first thing we do is suspend the account until the situation is clarified. And if it doesn’t become clear, we will block the database and ban the user. And this really happens quite often: we regularly ban spam accounts .

UniSender reserves the right to close a user account without compensation if the percentage of complaints (that is, recorded dispatch of messages sent to the spam folder) from subscribers to receive unwanted correspondence exceeds 0.5% of the number of recipients in the mailings (but not less than 20 people) within 15 days.

A fine of 500 rubles will be imposed on the spammer for each official client received from the mailings from anti-spam organizations (SpamCop, SpamHaus and others) if we are not provided with convincing explanations - why it happened. The truth of this last, last resort, we have not yet practiced, since banning an account and evicting a scoundrel is much easier and more effective. But we also leave this weapon in our arsenal: spammers will not pass!

Too weak anti-countermeasures can give spammers the opportunity to use our service with impunity, and too cruel can scare away honest, decent, and cruel treatment to marketers who are justly unaccustomed. But we want to assure you: if you honestly collect your base, and care about your recipient, if your clients react positively to your letters - you have nothing to fear. For you, the unwritten rule "chotky - come in." Come and enjoy all the benefits of the service, because for us you are a dear, important and beloved customer. It is for you that we create and improve our service. It is for you that we are fighting for the reputation of our service - including in this article. It is for you on the site that online support is available , which can be addressed with any question before the mailing starts: in case you do not have enough experience, simply ask us a question.

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