As part of its white paper on deliverabilityBadsender put 10 questions to French deliverability specialists. Today, you'll find the question that was put to Philippe AntuoroTechnical expert, SFR and VP Services and Development, SignalSpam.
What are the economic stakes of the fight against spam for an ISP? Is the fight against spam seen as a strategic issue by management?
For a French operator, there are two ways to see email. Either as a cost center, I have to provide an email service to my customers, or as an opportunity to generate additional revenue. So we have two different situations, on the one hand operators providing a basic service and on the other hand those who are trying to develop a business model around webmail services, via advertising, with a turnover directly linked to the audience.
In this second case, it will be necessary at the very least that the valuation of the service reimburses the costs associated with it.
These advertising revenues can be of two kinds, the sale of space via advertising agencies, but also self-promotion. In some cases, we even see that the disconnection to the webmail redirects to the portal of the operator and thus brings him directly traffic.
To go further, the mobile application fulfills, in this case, exactly the same purpose, selling advertising space and self-promotion.
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But to make a webmail profitable and keep its users, one element is essential, to have the trust of the latter. To achieve this, operators must fight against all the elements that can be irritating for users and especially spam. That is to say, avoid that spam invades the email box and especially, fight against any form of phishing. This also requires the implementation of innovative strategies such as automatic unsubscription from the webmail (but also from the mobile application) or automatic identification of advertisements.
To come back to the question, for marketing departments, webmail is a real issue because the email service is widely used and represents the brand image, a potential audience and a web / portal turnover. However, the fight against spam and the identification of greymail is not perceived as strategic. Indeed the fight against spam is not an end in itself, it has become over the years an important theme to address if an ISP wants to keep its email users in an ergonomic and pleasant customer experience.
On the other hand, if we talk about phishing and cybercrime, then the issue is seen as strategic, right up to the top management, because the brand is attacked by usurping it or using it to steal users. The role that ISPs play in the French economy leaves no room for improvisation on this subject and operators have legal obligations in this area.
One aspect that is very often ignored regarding phishing or scams is that the attacks can very quickly backfire on operators with significant losses if nothing is done. An example among others would be a scam email campaign whose initial vector is email and which would try to get a large number of phone numbers in order to send them fictitious SMS alerts to incite them to call premium rate numbers. In this case, the operator is sometimes obliged to bear the financial burden of its injured customers by refunding them. It is therefore easy to understand that this is a strategic issue because the brand image of the operator is affected in terms of digital confidence, but in addition, various compensations must be added to the injured customers.
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