SKYLIST is a permission-based email service provider that works with leading corporations and organizations to help them communicate with their customers and members. Each customer 'database' is owned by our clients and is separate from other sites. SKYLIST does not own, rent, or sell any email addresses or other personal information.

We have a diverse customer base covering the entire spectrum of email services including interactive discussion forums, monthly newsletters, pay-to-subscribe stock market tips, website confirmations, and freebies and specials. We work with Fortune 500 corporations, 300,000-member organizations, and small mom-and-pop website entrepreneurs.

Good Internet Neighbors

We take a number of steps to make sure we that we are "good neighbors" with other mail servers:

• All mail is RFC compliant.
• The system tracks bounces and immediately removes errors of type 550 (user unknown).
• Connections are limited by IP address to avoid overloading other mail servers.
• All DNS records have valid contact information that are checked regularly.
• We do not have any open relays.

We take a number of precautions to enforce these rules:

• We require that all incoming data include a description of how the user signed up and where it came from.
• We quarantine all new data in the system for 48 hours, sending a small test to the list to gauge response.
• We search for common signs of "tainted" or "spidered" lists. If a "tainted" list is found the entire list is rejected, not just the suspicious addresses.
  

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do you verify that the true owner of the email address that you have obtained has subscribed to your list?

   We take this issue very seriously and do everything we can to validate new customer lists proactively with a series of initial validation steps and ongoing operational monitoring. We have put a significant number of resources into customizing our mail system to allow us to test new customers and prevent common problems. This is not just a technical problem - it starts with a prequalification form used for all incoming sales prospects and referrals and is an integral part of the sales process.

   Unfortunately, we don’t know of any perfect way to prequalify every address on a new client’s list. Therefore, we are forced to take a “test and monitor” approach where we look at the mailing results and symptoms to determine the validity of a new subscriber list.

   First, we run a set of proprietary scripts on the address list to search for common signs of a “spidered” list. If we see addresses from “die.net” or other known spamtraps then the list will be rejected automatically by our import utility. We also look at the percentage of addresses that match our “global remove list” – if there is a high percentage of matches we take this as a sign that the list is not legitimate and is likely to generate more complaints.

   Once we have prequalified the data and loaded it into our system, it automatically enters a “quarantine” holding area. No mail can be sent to the new list until a small mailing is sent to a random sample of the list. We monitor the bounce rate and complaint rate from the test mailing to determine signs of possible abuse. If the hard bounce rate is over 10% or more than 5 complaints per million, the list is rejected and the customer is not allowed to mail to it.

   Note: Quarantine thresholds are subject to change at any time in response to ISP requirements. This web page is not an authorative source for up-to-the-minute statistics.

2. What are your standards for accepting your clients' email lists?

   Each of our customers must sign an Acceptable Use Policy and agree to our privacy policy. In addition to other requirements, our AUP states:

   • All mail must be optin or double optin (no UCE or Spam)
   • All new customers must have source information for all records, preferably Singnup URL, Signup Date, and Signup IP address
   • Every domain that sends mail must have a working website and unsubscribe form
   • All single optin subscribers must be sent a permission pass
   • All mail must be RFC compliant
   • All mail must include clear, working unsubscribe instructions
   • No mail can be deceptive or misleading
   • No mail can promote sexual products or pornography
   • No mail can promote pyramid schemes or anything illegal
   • All mail must include a valid non-internet contact method

3. Does your company accept email lists that have been rented, leased, or bought? If no, how do you ensure this? If you receive complaints about a specific client, what action is taken?

   Only if they are valid optin subscribers. We really try to avoid anything that is not a clearly represented coregistration.

   We ensure this through a detailed prequalification form during our sales process, Internet research on the customer’s background and mailing history, and systematic testing of all new email lists (see the quarantine process described above).

   We take every complaint seriously and monitor every customer closely. For all large customers, we use dedicated IP addresses to mail from so that it's very clear to us exactly which customer is generating the complaint.

   However, we do realize that our high volume customers sending more than one million emails per day will receive a small number of complaints each from each mailing. We keep daily counts about the complaints for each customer and restrict their mailing ability if this rises above 50 complaints per million emails sent. We have the ability to set this threshold on a per domain basis if needed.

   We also read each complaint to determine the severity. Sometimes it's obvious that a user is simply confused about how they signed up. More serious complaints are researched in detail and responded to with information about where and when the user opted in.

   We have terminated a handful of customers for violating our AUP in the past. Normally our quarantine process and daily reporting allows us to be more proactive – restricting a customer’s mailings, rejecting certain files, or using permission passes to reduce the complaints.

   We are always evaluating and improving our complaint handling process and are open to any feedback or suggestions you might have.

4. Do you restrict how much mail any one address can receive?

   We are an ASP so different customers are sending mailings every day. Discussion forum users are mailing around the clock. Some newsletters go out monthly or weekly, while other promotional mailings are sent an average of 3 times per week. We also work with daily news and announcement lists.

5. Do you remove email addresses from your list if emails to them bounce? How many bounced emails are required before you consider the email address to be inactive and subject to removal from your list?

   Yes. We attempt to remove invalid email addresses as soon as possible to avoid wasting resources mailing to them. We have a sophisticated mail engine that allows us 3 levels of bounce detection.

   1. While sending – if the foreign mail server returns a “550” code while sending the user will be marked invalid and never mailed again.
   2. All mail is sent with a Return-Path and other headers (VERP) that dynamically route bounces back to a daemon that can easily determine exactly which user record it is from. Since these bounces are not as clear as 550 error codes, we have a limit of between 3 and 5 “soft bounces” before an address is removed.
   3. Since we run multiple, separate mail systems for different customers, we synchronize “hard bounces” between our customers to avoid wasting resources on bad addresses.

6. After an email address reaches your bounce limit, how long (i.e., minutes, hours, etc.) does it typically take to remove the email address from your list?

   As soon as the user hits the soft bounce limit the address is immediately and permanently removed. No new mailings will be queued to that user, although any active mailings currently in the process of sending may result in the delivery of an additional mailing.

7. If a user unsubscribes from your email list, how long (i.e., minutes, hours, etc.) does it typically take to remove the email address from your list?

   All unsubscribe requests are processed immediately. If the servers are very busy with a lot of incoming mail it may take up to 5 minutes. After an unsubscribe request is processed, no new mailings will be queued to that user, although any active mailings currently in the process of sending may result in the delivery of an additional mailing.

8. If a user unsubscribes from your email list, what happens to that email address in your database?

   These requests are treated with the highest priority and permanently logged redundantly for safety. The address is saved in the database as a unsubscribe and can never be mailed again by that customer. Our technology is constructed in such a way as to ensure that it a programmatic impossibility for mail to ever be sent again from this customer to the unsubscribed recipient. As a final security step, we preclude our customers from altering or deleting any unsubscribe records.

9. Other questions? Email them to abuse@skylist.com

Contacting the Postmaster

To contact our Postmaster team please email postmaster@skylist.com