Loan Status Updates

All SS emails hit my spam folder too

1) Platform Risk.

Many of the free accounts (especially gmail) are regularly hacked without their owners being aware.  What % of the largest investors will be using free email accounts when managing 6 or 7 figure investment portfolios ?     Very few I should imagine. Most will be using hosted email accounts with multiple layers of spam and anti-virus protection.  (My spam folder gets less than 1 spam message a month - the rest are dealt with at source by the reliable and impressive spam filtering deployed by my isp, plusnet)

Incidently last night (Thurs to Fri) was a good test of your spam protection - anyone who received a spam message with the word 'Test'  in the subject line needs to think carefully about whether their mail provider is really doing their job - there were billions of such emails sent last night, and any spam filtering worth its salt should have dropped them at source.

I think its reasonable to assume SS are probably now unable to communicate with many of their larger investors.

Edit:  And why do I class this as platform risk ? That email today included a request for potential underwriters to get in touch to help support a forthcoming loan.  Only most of that target audience won't have received the email. 


2) Personal Risk
 
Suppose SS reach the point with one of their loans that they need lenders to cast a vote (as per AC/TC). Many of the largest lenders will not be able to take part because they won't have received the email.  There is a risk that the will of the smaller investers who might be after "revenge" sway the vote without the balance of the larger investors who may have a cooler head.


Amazon Web Services are designed for home businesses to be able to have a on-line shop.  They are not appropriate for a regulated financial services company.  It would be a laughing matter if it wasn't for the millions of our money SS are managing.
 
Edit: Unfortunately some parts of the SS operaton still reflect the very amateurish startup of 12 months ago when we were ripping them to shreds on this forum and the zopa forum.  It still bears the hallmarks of someone's spare bedroom project.  Yes, harsh words, but its mainly voicing my disappointment and frustration that SS seem unable to transform themselves into a professional outfit.
 

It's all a bit of trial and error. From memory I believe BT stopped using the Yahoo mail servers last year as there were too many spam error problems and moved everything to Cisco. Cisco own 1&1 which I use from time to time. The 1&1 mail system can be a bit hit and miss on spam interception so rather than keep checking whether they've got it 'right' or 'wrong' I disabled the spam interceptor on their server. Everything is set up to auto forward to my GMail address which then forwards onto my desktop mail system. GMail I've found to be extremely effective but that also makes the odd error so it's worth keeping an eye on the spam folder.

Funnily enough, well not really, once BT dispensed with the services of Yahoo I believe Sky then got into bed with them. So it's all go figure for us end user folks and don't get me started on the TalkTalk systems.

Three free accounts, no "Test" spam, just a couple concerned about my size or stature (nothing to do with my investment size)

 ... ahem ... "in vestment size" maybe??


PS My SS mails come in to hotmail (that was) OK.

This is the crux of the problem.  I think I read somewhere that 90+% of all emails sent are spam, and the great majority of those are filtered out in transit and never reach the point where a decision is made whether to put it into your inbox or your spam folder.  I get very little mail that goes into my spam folder, so most of the time that a message goes missing -- such as the recent general broadcast messages from SS -- there's nothing I can do about it.

I think I'd much rather that there was a bit less aggressive filtering at the higher levels and more got through to me -- if it meant that there'd be fewer genuine messages to me that disappeared into cyberspace.  Then again, I wouldn't want to have to deal with hundreds of spam emails arriving so there's probably not an easy solution.

Just to clarify the plusnet email filtering is working as designed. There are multiple levels of filtering, each an external service that plusnet pays handsomely for.

The first level is before the whitelist, and bounces back to the sender all emails from IP addresses that are known to be used by spammers.  SS have confirmed they are receiving bounceback from plusnet against my email address with "spam" as the reason. This reduces the processing load considerably, and protects the plusnet infrastructure from the almost denial of service level of spamming that happens occaisonally (as per overnight 13th/14th Nov).    The downside is I can't receive any email from organisations that use email hosting companies (such as Amazon Web Services) that are perpetually flagged as being used by spammers.

If an email passes that first test at plusnet, the whitelist is processed. If it is on the whitelist it heads straight to the inbox. Otherwise further checks are done, some as part of the standard plusnet email package, others are paid for extra subscription checks. There is also a configurable option as to how agressive you want the spam filter to be, I have it set at the lowest.  These checks assess the probability of a given email being spam, and route to various configurable spam folders (depending on the extra subscription(s) paid for). By cross checking with multiple spam filters, the problem RR referred to of good emails being falsely marked as spam is diminished, and anything that does end up in my spam folder is almost certainly spam.

Only the first check bounces emails back to sender, all subsequent checks will deliver the email to a folder somewhere.

And quite honestly I simply don't want to receive emails from IP addresses used by spammers, so for me the plusnet email service is indeed impressive. That SS are using such shared IP addresses for their mailings is their problem not mine.

If you take a look at www.mailingmanager.co.uk/pricing-monthly.php  which is just one UK based email service I picked at random from a google search, and scroll down the pice list, you'll see tht it is possible to pay for a dedicted IP address for mailings.  This can then be communicated to (for example) Cisco / Senderbase.org who are causing SS's Amazon Web Service emails to be bounced, and will be added to their whitelist.  But this will cost more than a Amazon Web Services solution so beloved of spambots.

I didn't realise this was being done, because I had been told that all it accomplished was to double the number of emails flying about.  Perhaps it's done on a selective basis, with only those that aren't 100% thought to be spam being bounced.  Or maybe everything is bounced in the hope that the volume of bounced messages will cause the mailservers' owners to take action to deal with the problem.  Unfortunately, I'd expect that a genuine spammers' mailserver would be able to ignore all those bounces and carry on regardless.

But it's good that SS have received an indication from the email system that there's a problem rather than having to wait for individual recipients to complain about their failure to receive messages.  After all, most people won't be aware that something that was sent to them didn't arrive.