I helped one of our sales folks out on a call today, and the topic was the world of B2B Deliverability. "We're entirely B2B," the prospective client informed me, meaning that deliverability to individuals at various companies is their primary concern, not deliverability to the top B2C (consumer) ISPs and webmail providers.
Truth be told, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft host a ton of inbound email for many thousands of B2B companies. Yahoo, Hotmail and Google host mail for more than 264,000 domains. A big chunk of those are small-to-medium sized companies who have outsourced their email handling to one of these mailbox providers. And they pretty much have the same spam filtering systems on the B2B side as on the B2C side.
On the spam filtering hosted service or appliance side, you've got companies like Postini, Barracuda, MessageLabs, Cloudmark, Frontbridge (Microsoft), Brightmail and many others. Probably Postini has the broadest reach, though it's not always easy to tell from the outside how big any of these providers really are. They probably all claim to host a bajillion mailboxes, but what really matters is, what percentage of subscribers on *your* list are hosted behind these various filters. That's the kind of thing we can tell with our domain intelligence data, helping you to understand that if you have a delivery issue at a Postini, it's likely to impact X% of your list.
After you figure out what the top domains and spam filters are (relative to your own lists), it's a simple matter for us to set up specific monitoring for those domains, or even just for any domain with over Y recipients and a Z% block rate.
That's about the only difference between B2C deliverability and B2B deliverability, what domains you look at when you're doing deliverability testing and whom you contact when an issue is revealed. Lots of people I talk to don't realize this - they don't know that 1500 domains on their list are all hosted by Postini or are behind a Barracuda filter. When you dig into it, you find that same commonality of hosting on your list that you find for B2C senders.
And the B2B filterers work pretty much the same way the B2C filters work. That means your sending reputation (and ability to deliver mail through these filters) is governed primarily by complaints and bounces. The usual things that, when they spike, indicate issues with permission.
Just like
I talked about in regard to Yahoo, your deliverability is not governed by us having "a relationship" with an anti-spam filtering vendor. We do maintain good relationships with quite a few vendors and I talk to many of them fairly frequently. Helping them test things, discussing the bigger picture of how to improve permission practices, showing them how ESPs prevent and react to spam issues, answering questions about our client practices, etc. But it is important to remember that it is exceedingly rare that we would ever have the ability to call one of these guys and "tell them that your mail is good" because that's not how the process works.
The Indianapolis Tennis Championship and ExactTarget will be working together this year. From the press release:
Enter the aggregator. The aggregator negotiates with each SMSC for you, giving you a single point of entry into the SMS delivery world. 
This years Catapult team is on the road. The group of 12 has been sent to cities around the midwest in search of video magic. Broken into three teams of four people each, Catapulters will be conducting interviews on the street to get at the heart of what subscribers want to hear from marketers. In years past, these street interviews were an independent project. This year, the interviews are being coordinated with the 2009 Channel Preferences Survey which addresses key topics related to email marketing, social media, and text messaging. 
When you talk about SMS marketing messages, you always talk about it in terms of the mobile device. 
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