A client was asking the other day about B2B deliverability, how it differs from B2C, who the big players are, etc.
This isn't the first time the topic of deliverability in the B2B (business-to-business) email realm. Back in June, I answer the question, "
Is B2B Deliverability Different?" In a
more recent blog post, I link to information from Google about how they've become a very large host of B2B mailboxes.
Clearly, Google is a big player in this space. Meaning, a lot of the B2B mailboxes you send to are going through spam filters run by Google; just as if your recipients were at Gmail.com. What that means to you is that the same rules apply to sends to both those Gmail.com users and any B2B domains hosted at Google.
As I mentioned before, Yahoo, Hotmail and Google host mail for more than 264,000 domains, Google making up approximately 106,000 of those domains. (All three of these guys probably host mail for very many more domains than this; this is just a snapshot based off of last year's client list data. Meaning, if a domain doesn't show up on an email list, I don't know about it.)
That means you've got a huge chunk of the B2B email space hosted by top consumer webmail providers. Meaning that the B2C rules significantly apply to B2B senders, by the fact that the same spam filters are involved.
In the more specific B2B realm, there are too many players to list. Postini, Cloudmark, Barracuda, Ironport, Symantec Brightmail and MessageLabs are just a few of them. There are hundreds, maybe thousands more.
The way these filterers work is very similar to how B2C ISP spam filters work. They build a reputational view of you based on spam complaints, engagement, bounce rates, etc. They're a bit more invisible to some senders, as it's not always easy for you to know exactly what % of your mailing list might be behind a Brightmail filter, for example. But they still matter, very much so. In this combination of hosted service providers and appliance developers, getting tagged as a bad guy means you end up with delivery problems far and wide.
If you end up with a bad reputation as measured by Barracuda, and your mail is going to be blocked or filtered at the
more than 85,000 customers that use Barracuda spam-filtering devices.
If Cloudmark determines the mail you send merits a bad reputation, you'll probably find it hard to successfully get to the inbox at any mailbox protected by any of Cloudmark's anti-spam solutions -- that's over
850 million mailboxes in 190 countries!
That's why B2C and B2C are more similar than you might have thought. Filterers handling either type of mail both look at your sending reputation, and treat your mail acordingly. Blocked at any of these providers on either side of things means that you're going to have issues delivering mail to a whole bunch of different mailboxes.