Email Service Provider

An Email Service Provider (ESP) is an organization which owns the facilities (servers, bandwidth and software) used by Advertisers and/or Publishers to send out email communications to consumers. ESP’s in general do not control or own the Lists of email addresses or choose which offers are sent utilizing their sending facilities.

Organizational Interest

An ESP is judged and compared to its competitors based on its ability to get messages successfully delivered into consumers’ inboxes. ESPs generally invest a great deal of time and effort to developing relationships with receivers (Yahoo!, AOL, Cloudmark, Hotmail, BrightMail) in order to insure that there IP addresses are granted deliverability to consumers and not caught by SPAM blockers.

Compliance Concerns

An ESP has limited ability to control the actual sends that there system makes. But as ESP’s offer more services to customers, they open themselves up to liability as many of those new services fall under CAN-SPAM jurisdiction and thus place the ESP in the collaborative compliance environment. The ESP’s customers (Publishers and Advertisers) may misuse the ESPs’ infrastructure causing a negative impact on the reputation of the ESPs IP addresses. In addition; an ESP can be found liable for the actions of their customers:

• Do emails sent through the ESP contain a working unsubscribe option?
• Is the ESP responsible for managing the backend of the unsubscribe process?
• Are those unsubscribe requests honored within 10 days
• Are the ESPs’ facilities being used to send email to harvested email addresses

Monitor Types: URL or IP based redirects (used in click tracking)

Collaborative Compliance Need: Medium

Liability: Full CAN-SPAM Compliance depending on specific services provided. Certain service providers can be protected under the safe harbor provision of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Solution: CAN-SPAM Compliance Monitor