A few weeks ago, I had the chance to visit VadeRetro, one of France's leading anti-spam specialists. For over two hours, I discussed the evolution of anti-spam and VadeRetro products with Dimitri Perret, the company's Business Developer. Dimitri Perret holds a Master's degree in Marketing from the Institut des Administration et des Entreprises in Lille. A globetrotter with a passion for music and technology, he began his career at IBM, in the sales department serving hosting and software publishers. He then joined Vade Retro Technology as International Marketing Manager to support the company's worldwide development.The interview
Many email marketers know VadeRetro as one of the tools used by the main French ISPs to filter spam. What are the main principles behind this filtering in your tool?
VadeRetro is mainly based on heuristic technology, and we're the only company on the market to use this type of technology. It's based on analysis of the structure of the email, header, subject, structure of redirects, presence of an unsubscribe link, etc. It's very different from what our competitors use, which is based on lists of IP addresses or words to ban. The main advantage of heuristic technology is its total independence from language. Another advantage is that we can build scores that identify the type of email we're dealing with. This takes the form of several types of status, such as Spam (DCE, Dirty Commercial Email) or different types of commercial email (MCE, Miscelanous Commercial Email). On this basis, we create a list that identifies goodsenders and badsenders. Obviously, thanks to this categorization, we are able to detect senders that we will be able to directly classify as Badsenders in the future.At the level of French ISPs, VadeRetro is mainly present for spam filtering, in order to differentiate between what is strictly commercial and what is pure spam. Statistically, we recently analyzed that 16% of the emails analyzed by VadeRetro were categorized as "Dirty Commercial Email", 73% as "Miscelanous Commercial Email" and the rest are categorized as priority. In the DCE stream, we have around 49% of emails that are prioritized (mainly transactional emails), 45% of advertisements and 5% of notifications or emails from social networks.Beyond the big French ISPs, who are VadeRetro's customers ?
In Europe, there are two types of customer in addition to ISPs. On the one hand, there are corporate customers, from large accounts to SMEs, and on the other, wholesalers/resellers and OEM integrators. We even have an offer for individuals called "LoveYourEmail".You have just opened an office in the United States, what is the objective? What is the profile of the new clients you are targeting?
We have opened an office in San Francisco. In the U.S., we focus on large structures, mainly ISPs and hosting companies, but also OEMs. When we approach the American market, we talk less about anti-spam. What we want to offer this market is our email classification offering, which is a real differentiator in this market. It's also a good way of opening up discussions without competing with anti-spam solutions already present in the company. On the American market, what's really different is the volume of email, which is far greater than that of our European customers.Most advertisers are not happy with the evolution of spam filtering technologies that are responsible for the decrease in performance of "legitimate" emailing programs. Are you ever pressured by advertisers (or spammers)?
Yes, we are under pressure from some people who would like to get better deliverability. We have a dedicated team that manages the relationship and we try to listen to them in order to have a constructive and beneficial relationship. But most of the time, it's the host or ISP that's in a position to help. So yes, they call us, but there's not much we can do for them. Otherwise, we haven't really had any complaints to the courts or anything like that, because it wouldn't have much effect anyway. We always manage to find a rational explanation for the way our filter works. If advertisers respect the rules, there's no reason for them to go to spam.What recourse is available to an advertiser who believes they are the victim of a false positive or who is blocked by your internal blacklist?
There isn't really an internal blacklist. It's more complicated than that. If we decide to totally block a player, it's because he's abused the system several times or tried to bypass filtering. The most important thing is to contact the ISP before contacting VadeRetro, as it has the right to pass you on. In extreme cases, very rare, senders can be put in touch with VadeRetro, but always via the ISP. If there is ever a legitimate block, unblocking is only possible after a commitment to good practice.Today, we see a significant movement towards categorizing different types of emails. Do you think that this categorization will become widespread in the next few years?
Yes, it really is the future of email. Ranking is a determining factor. For us, it's reassuring to see that Google is on board, even though we deployed it before them. For example, SFR has been adding a visual tag to its webmail for several years now, to show that it's an advertisement. This service is offered via VadeRetro, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that in the US, there is a great deal of interest in this subject. According to Gartner, 82% of users are not satisfied with their filtering solution (Magic Quadrant 2013). VadeRetro was cited by Gartner as the only player to enable Graymail management. 82% of emails received by individuals are graymails, which means that less than 20% of emails are classified as interpersonal or priority. In the corporate world, 51% of emails are graymails, so it's a real challenge for companies to improve their productivity. Our aim is to display the most important messages so that they are instantly available and visible.Phishing is probably the biggest problem that email users are currently experiencing. Do you have any figures to share with us on the extent of the problem in France? Do you help routers to detect spammers using their platforms so that they can block them?
We are very involved in the fight against phishing, taking part in MAAWG conferences for example, and we publish public and collaborative lists to combat phishing on the isitphishing.org website. This VadeRetro initiative includes several partnerships enabling us to feed a database that can be used by any organization "receiving" emails. It's worth noting that the idea for VadeRetro originated with the creator of Goto Software, who was fed up with receiving spam. So, even though we're a commercial company, we're really committed to making email secure and fighting spam.Finally, what advice would you give to an advertiser who feels that he is a victim of overly aggressive spam filters? (but who thinks he is "legitimate")
Our vision is that, yes, you will probably be classified, but not necessarily as spam. Email users always filter advertising emails manually in their inboxes. Advertisers have no control over this. Today, users will no longer have to do this work, as they will be classified automatically. Users will therefore eventually have the option of returning to these commercial e-mails. The recipe remains mainly marketing: personalize the message well, have a more punchy headline, respect permission, etc. We are also increasingly implementing one-click unsubscribing. This technique scares advertisers, who are afraid of seeing waves of mass unsubscribes, and yes, this will undoubtedly happen. But is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. Advertisers need to be careful. If they want to play the bad guy by trying not to be compatible with instant unsubscribing, it will backfire. Trying to circumvent VadeRetro's rules is likely to get them into more trouble than it's worth.VadeRetro focuses on the benefits for the user, we're not against routers or advertisers. With graymail management, we believe that anti-spam is no longer enough. Gartner's latest report clearly states that users don't care about the clinical definition of spam, but find that they receive too many advertising emails in their inbox.Need help?
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