How does AntiSpam service work on email marketing service?

The email marketing service Pechkin-mail.ru was created to quickly and simply send and analyze email newsletters. However, at the same time, Pechkin is one of the elements of the global anti-spam system that protects regular email users from receiving spam.

In RuNet, we are daily and hourly confronted with attempts to “push through” subscribers by the purchased address bases, by the databases of subscribers from open sources, by so-called “partner” bases. In order to avoid complaints and everyone feel comfortable in our Anti-Spam agreement in Pechkin, a monitoring and moderation system was developed that allows us to reliably filter spam messages sent through our service.

Automatic rating system

First, let us tell you about the rating system, which allows you to automatically filter customers on reliable ones, which we skip right away, and potentially dangerous ones that need close attention. So, each client can be assigned a certain number of rating points (from 0 to 10), based on which the client can be assigned to several classes:

• newbie (from 0 to 2 points)
• fine (3 to 5 points)
• good (from 6 to 8 points)
• trust (from 9 to 10 points)

These classes define pools of ip-addresses through which mailings are sent. Thus, good customers are sent with good ones, without spoiling each other's reputation, and bad ones with bad ones.

What are points awarded for?

Scoring goes with each successful (not blocked by spam filters of email providers) distribution. And at the same time part of the points is removed depending on the following factors:

• Pressing the “This is Spam” Button
• The percentage of formal replies exceeds the average for Pechkin
• The percentage of “hard returns” exceeds the Pechkin average

Almost all email providers have “This is spam” button . Based on their keystrokes, they train their own spam filters, however, some of them have FBL (Feedback Loop) . In RuNet, the FBL from Mail.ru as part of their Postmaster service is basic for us. This allows us to receive information about such a click, immediately unsubscribe such a subscriber from receiving newsletters from a specific client and gives us a “signal” that something is wrong. We, of course, understand that there are always “urban madmen” or a person could forget about a subscription, so we allow a certain minimum percentage of clicks on such buttons,
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“Hard returns” are returns of letters to us back with the marks: “User does not exist”, “User is blocked”, and so on. Those. all those reasons that 100% will not allow to deliver the letter to the recipient. The presence of a large number of such addresses (significantly higher than the average on Pechkin) - a signal that the address base can be purchased. However, everything here is also not immediately clear - after all, the base may be for reactivation (for those users who used your service or store a year or more ago), then we enter the position and do not block the account.

Each factor has its own “weight”, which we take into account when removing points.

The most severe sanctions - zeroing of the rating is applied when direct complaints of users to the data center, to us or to the postal provider. In this case, if our client does not provide proof of the legality of the subscription within 24 hours (server log, database screenshot, subscription rules, manual questionnaire, etc.), his account will be blocked. Also, blocking is carried out on the basis of blocking from spam filters of mail providers. In this case, our client is invited to send a justification of the legitimacy of their mailings, as well as fill out the form with the mail provider with evidence that he is not a spammer. If everything is good and the client is “not a deer”, then his mailings will be quickly unblocked and the normal circulation of letters on the account will be restored.

If the client does a cool newsletter, then after the 6th successful mailing, he gets the class good and we start to moderate it automatically.

Manual Moderation

Yes, we manually moderate mailings from unreliable (so far) customers. This allows us to track incorrect (contrary to the laws of the Russian Federation) content, as well as send mailings for revision if they do not meet the formal requirements for the design of mailings from Mail.ru. Manual moderation of the sent mailings is the most effective way, albeit a resource-intensive one (up to 500 mailings can be created through Pechkin per day).

This is the system we have built on the service for countering spam. This is another contribution to the general system of protecting ordinary Internet users from receiving unauthorized messages.