This vital tool in any anti-spam arsenal has been around for years, and is signing partnerships with many companies you know and even with some you like.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 2, 2007]

Eric Castelli and Brandon Phillips founded St. Louis, Mo.-based LASHBACK in 2003 to monitor the actual behavior of unsubscribes. Today, the company earns revenue from legitimate e-mail marketers who want to make sure their practice is legal while bartering security for data with ISPs and individual end users.

LASHBACK's UnsubSafe product is offered for free to ISPs and individuals and comes in two versions:

• The original product, still available, was a toolbar that integrated into Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. The toolbar blocks spam and enables safe unsubscribing from e-mail lists.
• LASHBACK's more recent version of the product integrates with an ISP's anti-spam system and gives users an unsubscribe button, perhaps on their webmail.

In either case, the ISP or end user can receive a report detailing the performance of UnsubSafe.

LASHBACK, in turn, gets valuable data concerning the performance of marketing campaigns in the real world.

"It's a great way for an ISP to distinguish its own service from others'," says Phillips.

How it works
"We do not make money off receivers and ISPs," says Castelli. "We make our money from senders who want to comply with CAN SPAM and e-mail best practices."

LASHBACK has been monitoring the performance of unsubscribes for years, and that reputation data, Castelli explains, is the key to the system. "What we do is provide a list of IPs you can trust with unsubscribe requests. We have all this data always coming in. We're constantly testing and building reputation data."

So you cannot hijack an IP and spam for five minutes? "You need to have a good reputation to be on our list," says Castelli. "Only organizations building a reputation get on our list. Organization trying to outrun their reputation, jumping from IP address to IP address, do not get on our list."

So how do you catch someone who seems to be behaving legitimately but is handing out the e-mail addresses of people who unsubscribe? "We've been developing our processes and procedures for several years. We run tests on every sender. One of the tests we run involves submitting a probe e-mail address, unsubscribing, and monitoring what happens with that address."

So does bad behavior happen? "We've caught thousands," says Castelli.

"We call it suppression list abuse," explains Phillips. "Advertisers around the world who comply with the CAN SPAM law have to maintain a suppression file and share it with other organizations and tell them not to misuse it. Of course, names get harvested from these files. But we're able to see the results. Our probes catch it."

Benefits
An old problem with spam was that those who benefited, the spammers, didn't pay the price. With LASHBACK's system, that's over. "Those who benefit from e-mail marketing are those who pay for the service," says Castelli.

So why do the marketers pay? "There are cases where internal processes fail, and there are cases of third party issues. In either case, they would have no insight into the problem without us."

The company is beginning to announce partnerships. It has already announced a partnership with Return Path, a company that helps e-mail marketers build and maintain good lists. Return Path uses LASHBACK's reputation data to enable its SenderScore service for e-mail recipients and SenderScore Certified service for e-mail senders (SenderScore Certified used to be known as Bonded Sender).

Anti-spam vendors are working with LASHBACK too. See, for example, our article on Cloudmark's latest release in Related articles, below.

So are you funded by venture capital or by Return Path? "We bootstrapped ourselves," says Phillips. "We started to derive revenues at the beginning of 2006. Before that, it was a loss. Although it took a long time, we've now built a strong team of professionals."

Want to meet the team? Castelli wants ISP-Planet's readers to know he'll be speaking on a panel called "ISP Feedback Loops & Unsubscribe" at the Authentication & Online Trust Summit 2007, on April 17 at the Boston Sheraton in Boston, Mass.

It's free
In conclusion, Phillips wants ISPs to know that working with LASHBACK is simple. "If ISPs are interested in working with us, they can call us directly, or whatever's convenient for them."

—End