Jul
29
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
When we set out to build a reputation data network we had a strong sense that the volume of email being sent to top receivers was staggering. But sensing is one thing. Having empirical data is another.
Which is why I'm so excited about the Return Path Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. Now we have actual email performance data that tells us what the email traffic really looks like.
You can read the report yourself here.
Here's my high level take on what we found:
Categories: Deliverability
Jul
17
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
It's fashionable in many circles to toll the death knell for email. Part of the reason for that is the rise of Web 2.0 - blogging, social networking, and other methods of interaction that supposedly make email obsolete.
The funny thing is, Web 2.0 tends to rely pretty heavily on email. All those LinkedIn and Facebook emails are the things that drive huge amounts of activity on the sites.
Take Twitter as another example. While Twitter has successfully created a whole new communication method (complete with the verb "to Twitter" and the noun "tweet") a large number of their new members come through email. Specifically they come from peer-initiated email, aka forward to a friend email. Unfortunately for them, a lot of that email was being blocked or junked. This is a common problem for any company that has email forwarding on their site.
Fortunately for Twitter ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jul
01
By J.D. Falk, Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
and Michelle Pelletier, Senior Director, Client Services
Four years ago, a small group of email technology experts - from AOL, Yahoo!, the open source community, and other places - got together to solve what seemed to be a simple problem: feedback loops, such as AOL's, were not standardized and often difficult to parse. The result was a draft standard called the Abuse Reporting Format, or ARF, which has been adopted by nearly every ISP that has created a feedback loop since then - including Comcast and other feedback loops hosted by Return Path. (It's called a "draft standard" because the document has not yet gone through the IETF's full standards process. Few changes are expected as that process continues.)
Once this specification was stable, AOL began to offer an ARF option for those feedback recipients who were ready for it. Being generally nice folks, however, they continued to offer the old format.
But now, AOL has announced on their postmaster blog that they will be offering Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) as the only format for Feedback Loop (FBL) reports. Beginning on September 2, 2008, AOL will remove all non-ARF FBLs. They will also convert all existing non-ARF FBLs to ARF. ...
Categories: Deliverability
Jul
01
By Tom Bartel
Chief Privacy Officer
Have you updated your email systems to comply with the new CAN-SPAM rule provisions enacted by the FTC back in May? If not, you might need to put the Fourth of July cookout on hold. These rules are enforceable starting on July 7.
For a refresher on what is now required, see my previous post. You can also listen to a recording of our client-only live Q&A session with attorney Alan Chapell of Chapell & Associates. Of course that brings me to another point: if you haven't already, you really need to consult your legal counsel to get the details on what your specific situation requires. We aren't lawyers!
A few more resources for you ...
Categories: Deliverability
Jun
27
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), of which Return Path is a very active participant, met recently in Heidelberg, Germany. Among other exciting projects, they finished two new best practices documents which have been lauded in the press as a big step towards stopping botnet spam.
("Botnets" are networks of computers infected by viruses or other malicious software, invariably without the owner's permission or knowledge, which are used to engage in criminal activities like sending spam or attacking web servers.)
Neither document, however, is actually about botnets - that'll come from the next meeting, which has a botnet theme. Instead, both describe simple ways to improve classification of mail sources, so that reputation scoring may be applied more accurately and effectively. I'll explain this further towards the end.
Email Forwarding Best Practices, edited by two of our friends at Comcast , describes a problem which only affects a small percentage of users - but for those who are affected, it's a big problem. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jun
23
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Yahoo! announced last Thursday that it is making two new domains available for email - ymail.com and rocketmail.com. They introduced the new domains to make it possible for new people ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jun
10
Return Path is heading to the historic town of Heidelberg, Germany this week for MAAWG's 13th General Meeting.
Look for our deliverability rock stars, George Bilbrey and J.D. Falk, moderating panels, answering questions and participating throughout the conference.
And, be sure to enjoy ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jun
02
By George Bilbrey, VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
J.D. Falk, Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
and Neil Schwartzman, Manager, Compliance and ISP Relations
We recently detected a recent spam run that used the domain of one of Return Path's businesses - Postmaster Direct. The spammers used some of our header and footer information to make the messages look even more like legitimate mail coming from Return Path. The spam was also noted in a couple of blogs.
This sort of attack is known in the anti-spam community as a "Joe Job" - named for, literally, a guy named Joe Doll, founder of Joe's Cyberpost, which was attacked in this way as an act of revenge some years ago.
So, let's use this as an educational opportunity to take a look at how spam and botnets work. Let's take a look at one example spam:
1. The sending machines appear to be compromised (meaning they were infected by a virus or Trojan horse, known more recently in the industry as "malware"): The sending IP addresses are from all over the planet. Malaysia, China, and Spain. For example, one domain appears to be ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
May
12
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we've had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in "grey" businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part -- the so what.
We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here's where we come out.
First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially "troublesome" clients: those whose businesses are illegal, or who advertise or sell illegal products; those whose businesses are involved in litigation around email, data, privacy, or security; and those whose businesses are in the grey area, or what we called in our discussions "morally hazardous." In the end, we decided ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
May
07
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
A few years back when we launched our blog, we disabled the comments feature because we got far too much spam and far too little actual conversation. Boy am I sorry for that! My post last week, Drawing the Line, drew a number of insightful comments by email. With the permission of those readers I'm going to share some of those comments here. (Meanwhile, a mirror post on my personal blog, OnlyOnce, drew a few public comments with similar themes.) Look for a third post in a few days which outlines where we come out on the debate.
The overwhelming consensus was that we should not treat legal businesses in "sin" industries any different than any other business. This position was articulated best by Dean F. Sutherland who wrote: "Stick to email practices and legality. Leave questions of morality to the private decisions of private folks. After all, one man's morality is another man's bad joke... and vice versa."
In fact, writer Thomas Kellar cited automobiles, insurance and pharmaceuticals, among others, as industries that might also be considered sinful. He, along with a few other writers, objected to the inclusion of guns on our list, which are protected by the Second Amendment.
Ed Levinson posed the question ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
May
05
By Alex Rubin, VP, Business Development
and J.D. Falk, Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
We are very pleased to announce that Comcast now offers a complaint feedback loop, powered by Return Path. (For you deliverability nerds, you might note that we got beaten on this announcement by our friends at Deliverability.com. We appreciate the plug!)
Those of us who work in the industry feel like everyone should, by now, grok what a feedback loop is and why it's so useful for both senders and end recipients of email. But we know that's not completely true yet, so this seems like a good time to review the history and initial purpose of feedback loops.
When a user clicks the "report spam" button (or equivalent) in their mail client, a copy of that message (a spam "complaint") is transmitted to their ISP. This type of system is generally only used by web-based mail clients such as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, or in custom desktop interfaces such as AOL's, though some anti-spam vendors offer plug-ins for Outlook or Thunderbird. The ISP can use these reports, in aggregate, to update and improve their spam filters. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Apr
30
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
We are having a bit of a debate at the moment internally around our Sender Score deliverability business about how to handle clients who are in businesses that are, shall we say, not exactly as pure as the driven snow. As a company that provides software and services to businesses without a vertical focus, we are often approached by all sorts of companies wanting our services where we don't love what they do. Examples include:
Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different. But common threads run through all three dimensions.
...Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Apr
28
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
Kudos to our friends over at Blue Sky Factory. They have been using our Sender Score suite of tools for their clients for some time now, and they are starting to see some real results. In fact, they just published a case study of their work with Caribbean Tours & Cruises.
Travel marketing can be tricky in the age of spam. Many of the words they would normally use in their content gets flagged by filters. The use of images - crucially important in making recipients long for that beach getaway - can get blocked and make emails unreadable. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Apr
22
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
"What's all the fuss about?" A marketer asked me the other day during an industry event. When you generally follow best practices for deliverability, she said, you usually can get into the inbox. Then, if a big block does occur, you just call Return Path to get it lifted. "There is enough wiggle room, right?"
Um, no. Not really.
Our smart client Nathan Murphy at Classmates.com got it right when he said the other day, "If I do my job well, I should never be in the position of having to contact an ISP because of a delivery problem. I feel that some people in the industry view email delivery as a reactive role and not preventative."
Can Return Path get blocks lifted for our clients because we know their practices and program integrity and feel comfortable representing them?
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Apr
16
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
This week the industry is, once again, abuzz with talk of the e360 lawsuit against Comcast. e360 was attempting to use the federal courts to force Comcast to accept unwanted mail, and the judge has ruled on the case. As email technology guru John Levine wrote on Friday morning, "it's a fun read."
Here at Return Path, I read Judge Zagel's order twice: first from an anti-spam perspective, and then again thinking about how it might affect our clients. Some marketers will surely find reasons to fear this judgement - but they shouldn't. This is good for them, too - because by protecting the ISPs' good-faith efforts to protect their users from objectionable email, Judge Zagel is protecting the inbox against the really bad stuff. Inboxes that are filled with scams, spams, and things that look like they might be scams or spams, are simply unusable. The only way for people to be able to find, read, and respond to the messages they want to receive is for the inbox to be free of the junk they don't want to receive.
Marketers who follow best practices, who respect their subscribers, and who (to put it simply) follow all the other advice we give, can and should continue to do what you've been doing. You'll get to the inbox, just like today. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Apr
07
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
Unfortunately, forging From: or other commonly seen email headers is trivially easy. It's one of the most frustrating oversights in the creation of internet email technology -- though of course that's only obvious in hindsight; it was just fine for the pre-internet networks of the late 1970s and early-mid 1980s.
Since then, things have changed -- and the most interesting recent technological advancements in email have been in the realm of sender authentication, which encompasses ways to verify that the apparent sender of a message actually is the entity which sent it. Before you can answer the question "can I trust this message?," you first have to ask "who sent it?" -- but before authentication, there was often no way to know for sure.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Mar
12
By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing
So you are sitting at your desk, staring at your email promotion calendar thinking "Is there a single new idea left in the world? What do my subscribers really want? What are the newest rules for getting to the inbox? What are other marketers doing to get out of the rut?"
If this describes you, then you need to come to Return Path's Email Expert Seminars . The smartest minds in email today will be on hand to give you a fresh perspective on email. You'll view the world from the perspectives of subscribers, ISPs and your fellow marketers. You'll also get a fresh perspective on email acquisition and learn some bold new ways to apply those same old best practices.
Our experts are coming to ...
Tell me moreCategories: Acquisition | Deliverability | Response
Mar
12
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
As many readers of this blog will no doubt already know, the JupiterResearch report on ESPs that was released this month found that 70% of marketers rank "deliverability" as their number one priority when selecting an email service provider. While we applaud marketer's attention to deliverability issues, it seems to us that their focus has been placed slightly in the wrong direction. As I've written before, ESPs cannot solve all deliverability problems for email marketers. Moreover, there is very little difference between the major players on the pieces that the ESP can control. Basically, you can stop worrying about whether or not your ESP can get the email through. They do a good job.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Mar
12
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Whenever I sit down to write about relevance, I find myself thinking "Is this a new idea? Don't marketers already know this? They must get the basics by now, right?"
Unfortunately, the answer appears to be a resounding "No!" Last week JupiterResearch released its 2008 Email Marketer's Buyers Guide and, as Direct Magazine columnist Ken Magill points out, the news isn't very good. The top criteria marketers use when choosing an ESP are deliverability and price. That is good news - as deliverability is the single most contributing factor to earning higher revenue. And keeping costs down also helps the bottom line.
However, as the report itself points out, looking to your ESP to solve your deliverability is completely misplaced.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Mar
04
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
That answer is simple. Because we love email and are committed to preserving and enriching the email ecosystem for everyone who uses it (except the bad guys.) There is a lot of coordination required if senders, receivers, and end users are to withstand the assault on email by the "axis of evil" - spammers, phishers, and other fraudsters that are polluting our email ecosystem. As champions of the email space, we have dedicated a lot of time and energy into supporting the online community and committing resources to making email work for everyone.
Return Path is proud to serve in the following capacities:
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Feb
29
By Chad Malchow
VP, New Business Development
I had the pleasure of attending Marketing Sherpa's Email Summit this week where I had the unique opportunity to network and gain valuable insight from savvy email marketers who openly shared their experiences, talked about their obstacles and raved about their successes. I am sure most of you read Marketing' Sherpa's summary report of their recent email summit. While I agree with most of the commentary, I was a little taken aback by the notion that deliverability is no longer a big topic and subsequently, not a big issue.
I am certainly not saying that relevancy is not important, or is search, or segmentation, social media, etc. I guess the word I would use is "relative," not "relevance." My point is, when you send an email message, your expectation is that it will be delivered to the intended recipient with the messaging you created. Much like print, television, word of mouth and radio, email is a prime communication channel that, for direct marketers, is intended to drive a response. If the message is not delivered, then the effort is futile.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Feb
20
By Leslie Price
Senior Product Manager, Accreditation and Consulting Services
Here at Return Path, we're constantly thinking & talking about reputation, authentication, and accreditation as the best way to achieve maximum deliverability. These three elements work in tandem to help ISPs better identify and ascertain whether the mail you send should reach the inbox of their subscribers.
With spam, phishing and spoofing proliferating the internet airwaves, delivery rates for legitimate marketers have been compromised. As a result, marketers must take extra steps to ensure the success of their email programs by differentiating themselves from the fraudsters and spammers. To do so, they should integrate these three methods into their overall email strategy to achieve campaign success.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Feb
08
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
In our quest to make your job easier, we have poked, prodded and tweaked our tool set to make our incredibly rich deliverability data even more meaningful and actionable. Today we added four new features to the Sender Score suite. These enhancements offer new ways to analyze and review data so you can better monitor and diagnose your deliverability situation, enhance your sending reputation, and minimize or prevent future blocking, filtering, and rendering issues.
Here's what we've added:
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jan
30
We're proud to announce that Cloudmark is using Return Path's Sender Score Certified whitelist as a means of determining inbox placement for commercial email. Cloudmark provides spam filtering solutions for North American ISP customers including Earthlink, Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter, Telus and Cincinnati Bell and a global base of service provider customers including THUS, Tele2, Clara.net, Fastweb, NTT OCN and NEC BIGLOBE. They have joined the ranks of Windows Live Hotmail, GoDaddy and soon Yahoo! and many major corporations and educational institutions making the most comprehensive and widely used whitelist 1.2 billion inboxes strong.
We are very excited about what this means for marketers who understand the importance of maintaining high reputation standards to earn a valid spot in the inbox rather than paying for placement. But we are also excited about what this means for ISPs.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jan
29
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Sender Score Certified is growing by leaps and bounds with the recent adoption of the Sender Score Certified whitelist by Cloudmark. This partnership makes Sender Score Certified the industry's largest, most comprehensive and widely used whitelist giving approved senders preferential treatment into over 1.2 billion email inboxes. Moreover, this gives Return Path's Sender Score Certified the largest footprint of any email certification program available today with coverage in more than 80% of the mailboxes operated by the top 20 ISPs worldwide.
This means that more receivers will use the high reputation scores of Sender Score Certified members as a positive determinant for inbox placement. Receivers that accept the Sender Score Certified whitelist include, among others, Windows Live Hotmail, Time Warner Cable, GoDaddy and soon Yahoo! and Yahoo! operated email properties.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jan
22
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
We've recently learned some news from AOL about changes to how they authenticate inbound mail as well as changes to their whitelist program. We'll know more after a question and answer session with AOL this afternoon (hosted by the ESPC) but here's what we know now.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jan
18
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
We waited a little while to make sure that 2007 was really and truly over before noting the interesting trends for the year. With a fair degree of certainty we can predict that 2007 won't return. After polling some of the smarter folks about deliverability at Return Path, here are some of the trends that we found interesting over the last year and what we think will happen in '08.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jan
04
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
I've always maintained that spam does not make one great, but Al Ralsky kept a relatively high profile for long enough that his unwelcome intrusions into our inboxes - and our friends' inboxes, and our parents' inboxes, and our children's inboxes - will be long remembered.
Today the entire email industry is cheering the arrest and indictment of Ralsky and his gang, which was reported in the Detroit Free Press this morning. It's obviously good news for anti-spammers, who have been clamoring for prosecutions of illegal spamming activity for more than a decade. But it's also wonderful news for the email marketing industry, which has been trying to show the world that they aren't spammers. Now, the marketers can point to Ralsky's illegal activities and state with one voice: "we do not do these awful things."
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Dec
03
By Tom Sather
Email Deliverability Consultant
The holiday season is here and the gloves are off. Competition for inbox placement and subscriber activity will be stiff as marketers vying for consumer dollars will increase both the volume and frequency of their special offers. To cope with the increase of email traffic, many marketers have decided to add new IP addresses to handle the load. But marketer beware! Some of the top ISPs are putting new IP addresses with no sending history on a short leash until they can gather enough reputational data to determine how to deliver the email. In order to establish a reputation on a new IP address, you will have to do the following:
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Nov
27
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
Return Path's has always been a pioneer in deliverability performance. As the industry's first email deliverability monitoring service, Return Path has remained at the forefront of email innovation since its launch in 1999.
Today, Return Path lends that same knowledge and expertise to the European market. With over 150 local ISPs who speak different languages, ESPs face challenges that are difficult to tackle independently without multi-lingual support and international relationships. What we found was that global marketers needed a deliverability "go-between" to help them efficiently manage overseas marketing campaigns with the same gusto and expertise available in the U.S. In response, Return Path launched the Sender Score Receiver Alliance with three charter members, e-Dialog, eCircle, and 1000mercis. Today, we are proud to announce the addition of our four newest members - Splio Développement, The Communicator Corp, IPT and Responsys.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Nov
15
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
After attending the recent MAAWG conference, I traveled to Europe where I spent much of my time with a variety of email service providers (ESPs) discussing the current market conditions and where they saw opportunities moving forward. On my flight home, I realized that there was one resonating theme around my conversations. Almost all of the ESPs I spoke with had significant concerns around supporting the portion of their client base that cause the most deliverability issues. It made me realize that the email deployment industry is setting their pricing policies all wrong.
For years, people have commented on (some might say complained about) the industry use of a CPM pricing model even though the ESP costs are roughly the same whether your campaigns are sent to 1,000 or 100,000 people. Whether or not you agree with this model on principle, it's clear to me that this is causing a problem now that many ESPs bundling their deliverability services as part of this CPM. Here is what's wrong with this picture...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Nov
13
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
On your daily commute, during your lunch hour or even between meetings, what is it that you see people doing other than reading the paper or drinking a hot cup of coffee? Checking email - and not on their laptops, but rather on their handheld mobile devices. In fact, the adoption of Blackberrys spawned the term "crackberry" to describe this rapidly spreading addiction that has essentially sparked a cultural change in how people communicate.
As a result, this "always on" medium has become a very attractive channel for savvy marketers. However, it poses the same rendering challenges we face in traditional email with the added complexity of operational and device differentiators that are beyond a marketer's control. Given that, how can you design your email campaigns effectively for mobile? Use Sender Score Campaign Preview.
Today, I am very pleased to announce that your mobile worries are over! Return Path has launched the first ever email rendering solution for mobile devices. Our Sender Score Campaign Preview tool will now allow marketers to see exactly what their email campaigns will look like on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and Blackberry devices.
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Oct
15
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
I've been working on email for more than a decade, and I've met a lot of people from all sides of the industry. When working on Yahoo! Mail and before that on Microsoft's MSN Hotmail, I was very popular at industry conferences. People would interrupt each other to introduce themselves, seek out my opinion, hand me their business cards, and so forth. It was really quite disconcerting.
I can understand why they thought it was necessary. In business, in politics, in almost every aspect of most peoples' lives, building relationships is inherent to accomplishing pretty much anything. But when it comes to deliverability, fawning over ISP staff will not get your mail where you want it to go. That's simply not how email operates.
In my experience, many marketers and other large-volume email senders confuse the tactics that will make the ISP staff like you with the tactics that will actually get your email to the inbox. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Sep
26
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
As a former statistical analyst, I was pleased to see the recent Email Insider column by Loren McDonald on Six Sigma email deliverability. I think Loren makes an excellent point: marketers should pay attention to deliverability in precisely the same way that U.S. manufacturers paid attention to quality control.
You can read Loren's column for details, but the gist is that the keys to deliverability are:
Categories: Deliverability
Sep
24
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
It has always been my belief that one of the contributions Return Path makes to the betterment of email is to facilitate the dialogue between senders and receivers. There's so much common ground there. Everyone wants to make consumers happy - happy consumers don't complain (can I hear a "yay" from receivers?) and happy consumers spend money (can I hear a "yay" from senders?). And we know that facilitating this dialogue is about more than just, well, dialogue. It means building systems and products that help senders and receivers find a common language and work together to make email the fun, safe, happy medium we all know if can be.
So with that backdrop I am very pleased to announce that J.D. Falk has joined the Return Path team. J.D., who joins us from the Yahoo! anti-spam product team, has been well known in the anti-spam space since the earliest days of email spam, and is very active in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), and other industry associations. J.D. has joined us to take over ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Sep
19
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Some of our best clients are retailers. Why is that? Because they understand the value of their email program - it gets measured month-after-month (sometimes week-after-week) by the revenue it pulls in. And retailers know that email that goes missing from the inbox earns them no revenue.
This was the case for Orvis. They had a successful program that was generating revenue. But they suspected deliverability problems. They signed on with Return Path and learned the ugly truth - on average 20% wasn't reaching the inbox.
Some of our work to get Orvis back on track was "the basics." ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Aug
13
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
The August 6 issue of The New Yorker hit the newsstands with a piece about email spam: how it started, where it comes from today and what people from various businesses are doing to try and stop it. It was interesting to see this topic covered in such a lofty publication.
For the most part we thought the article was spot on. The writer discussed the matter at a fairly high level, but offered the lay reader a good sense of what the real issues are surrounding spam and filtering.
However, we thought the writer's discussion of reputation metrics as a way to combat spam was a little off-base ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jul
19
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Today, we announced a major upgrade of our Sender Score Monitor deliverability platform to include integrated real-time reputation analytics into our Mailbox Monitor campaign tracking module (see the official release here).
Well, we've reported - and others have echoed - that sender reputation is the main driver of blocking and filtering by ISPs and commercial spam filters. On average, 83% of false positive filtering of legitimate, permissioned, marketer and publisher email is driven by the reputation of your sending IP address or domains - things like complaints, security holes in your email servers, and spam trap hits.
So now our service helps guide clients to immediately diagnose all of the major root causes of deliverability failures.
Why is this a big deal? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jul
09
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Back in 2005, when commercial emailers started adopting authentication en masse, the Direct Marketing Association stuck its neck out a bit and took a leadership position by requiring that all of its member companies authenticate their email.
Of course, this was much easier said than done. First, marketers found authentication confusing and weren't sure exactly what standards to implement or how to do it from a technical standpoint, or how to ensure comprehensive enterprise-wide authentication across all outbound email servers, including those of vendors and partners. And then, for the DMA, tracking compliance was nearly impossible in a comprehensive way, although secret shopping and spot checking have been producing positive results since authentication became de rigeur (apparently, I am feeling very French today).
In my role as chairman of the DMA's Interactive Marketing Advisory Board I saw a great opportunity to use Return Path's Sender Score technology to help solve both of these problems. The result is the soon-to-be-launched Email Reputation Registry (see official announcement here). ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jul
01
By Dan Deneweth
Director, Product Management
Rendering has been a hot topic in email marketing for most of 2007, but many clients still aren't sure exactly what it means or exactly how to deal with it. This is why we ran a webinar last week on this very topic.
In the webinar we revealed the six steps to most effectively deal with image suppression...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jun
26
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
It's not easy to be a big ISP these days. Consumers expect to be protected from unwanted email and from images that might offend them or link that might be dangerous. Marketers, meanwhile, complain about their permission-based messages that end up in the bulk folder or get mangled beyond comprehension by image suppression.
Microsoft is now offering a way for best-practices email marketers to bypass image suppression and be sure their images show and their links work, automatically. They have decided that users of Sender Score Certified will have images and links enabled by default when sending to Windows Live Hotmail. Because companies accredited by Sender Score Certified meet such high email standards, Microsoft knows that their subscribers will be safe with this decision.
We are obviously excited about this - it offers a huge new benefit to our certified senders and gives even more reason for senders to apply to be certified.
Why are the inclusion of images and links important? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jun
21
By Dan Deneweth
Director, Product Management
Earlier this year we wrote a blog posting detailing the design challenges posed by the release of Outlook 2007. In that post we detailed how Outlook 2007 does not support dozens of CSS elements that previous Outlook versions support - a huge issue for anyone involved with designing email.
Well, our friends at CampaignMonitor have taken that idea a step further and put together a comprehensive PDF that lists the major email readers and what CSS elements they do, or don't, support.
On a related note ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jun
20
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
With a series of three consecutive, semi-organized blog postings (here, here and here), Stephanie, Neil, and I have sparked some debate about permission in email marketing. It even prompted Mark Brownlow to cross post and refer to our hallowed halls here at Return Path. Taken together, I think the posts make a powerful point:
Permission to use an email address is not permanent and all-encompassing; it probably has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not your emails get delivered; but it's still a good foundation for a successful email program, especially up-front.
Yesterday, I spoke at the DM Days conference here in New York about deliverability and reputation and was asked some more tactical questions about permission that bear repeating here in another sequel to our earlier postings. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jun
19
By Neil Schwartzman
Manager, Compliance and ISP Relations
My colleague Stephanie Miller recently posted asking the question "Is permission enough?" A good question! But it begs the question: When it comes to email, what is permission?
For some time now I have contended that confirmed cpt-in, also known as COI, is dead, or at the very least on life support. It certainly is not a major factor in the continued relation between sender and receiver; that relies far more heavily on the ongoing and historical reputation of the mailer and the mail stream. Proof of permission doesn't scale, and is hard to retain.
But then, in my capacity as Executive Director of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), I recently had two eye-opening experiences as to exactly why confirmed (or, if you prefer, double) opt-in is critical to the whole email equation. ...
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Jun
18
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
My colleague Stephanie Miller wrote a great post last week titled Is Permission Enough? The essence of her argument is:
...permission is not forever...Subscribers opt in and then promptly forget about their actions...Nor is permission a panacea. Opt-in doesn't replace relevancy and keeping your promises.
And she goes on to give great examples of how marketers abuse permission and a great checklist of times marketers shouldn't assume permission, which is where the trouble starts.
So I concur -- permission is never enough from a sender's perspective. But you still have to have it. Why? Read on. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jun
05
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
My colleague Neil Swartzman wrote a great post announcing the new MAAWG Sender Communication Best Practices which Return Path wholeheartedly endorses.
As Neil recommends, you and your team should definitely take the time to review the whole document and discuss how you can implement the practices. But we also understand that it can be hard to find the time, so we wanted to give you a quick and dirty rundown of the top six areas to focus on ...
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Jun
04
By Robert Barclay
Senior Product Manager
The Internet Engineering Task Force has approved DomainKeys Identified Email (commonly known as DKIM) as a technical standard for email. This clears the way for emailers to implement DKIM and for ISPs to potentially use it to either block or allow email through its system.
We actually think this is great news. It means that DKIM will eventually become the replacement to DomainKeys (DK) as the primary cryptographic-based authentication standard. DKIM has some great advantages over DK, but for my money the biggest one is "third party signing," meaning it allows a domain other than the "From:" domain to sign the messages. There are many cases where the person sending the mail doesn't control the "From:" domain. Third party signing solves that problem, and as a result makes it much more likely that large companies can sign all their mail, even when outsourced to an ESP.
So what's a mailer to do? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
Jun
04
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Last week Lyris released a deliverability study that finds that content does not cause email to be filtered. This finding echoes a study we did in October that reported that content matters only about 17% of the time.
Lyris came to their conclusion by sending messages through their content checking system and noting that the SpamAssassin "spaminess" scores were very low - much lower than should be a cause of filtering. And yet, the messages weren't necessarily making it to the inbox. Any marketer who has used a spam checker system and gotten the "all clear" only to see their email land in the junk folder (or worse) will understand this phenomenon.
Our study we took a different approach. We took messages that had failed to reach the inbox and re-sent them off a "clean" IP address. Most times, the email reached the inbox, indicating that it was the reputation of the IP and not the message itself, which resulted in filtering.
In both studies, the message is the same ...
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May
25
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Yesterday we announced that we had been getting reports of mixed results in terms of testing the rendering functionality of the newly released AOL web client. Our tests uniformly indicated that accounts that had existed prior to the code rollout on May 23rd did not have images turned off by default, while new accounts do have the images turned off (which had not been the case prior to the 23rd). We took this to mean that the images off setting would only affect new accounts. However, several people reported to us that their testing uniformly showed images off by default in the AOL web client for pre-existing accounts or showed a mixture of images off and on for pre-existing accounts.
Obviously we found this confusing, so we asked AOL about it.
AOL's official response is ...
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May
24
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
We've gotten word from some people that ran the same tests that we did yesterday that our posting on the AOL.com image rendering was wrong. These tests showed pre-existing AOL or AIM accounts that had not had their display settings changed and they see that the images are now turned off by default - a change from the initial setting. This is different from the results of our testing on our seed accounts that had also not been changed in any way. In our tests these existing accounts still showed images defaulting to the on setting.
This may be due to the way that AOL is rolling out the change, with not all accounts being updated simultaneously. We've been in contact with AOL on this and will get official word to you later today. Stay tuned...
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May
23
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
In an Email Insider column last week, Chad White wrote about the adoption of authentication processes and gave what we believe is a false impression that authentication is a sort-of annoying task that belongs down in the IT basement.
We believe authentication is something that should be front and center on the mind of every marketing executive. While they don't need to know every technical detail, they should understand what it is and be able to ask intelligent questions of the IT folks so they can make sure the standards are being implemented.
In reporting that 43% of legitimate email volume is certified by Sender ID (a stat from Microsoft) and 48% of retailers have implemented DomainKeys, Chad sees the glass as half-full - most people authenticate, so let's just get past this already.
We hate to be the pessimists here, but this glass looks a little more than half empty to us ...
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May
23
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
The eec sent around an email yesterday with some alarming news about the new release of AOL.com and AIM email. According to their report, subscribers using either of these email environments will have their images turned off by default and open rates will suddenly plummet.
Our testing indicates that this is inaccurate. In fact, the new release does suppress images by default, but only for new subscribers to these services. Existing AOL.com and AIM email users will maintain the same image settings they have today. It is certainly true that this change will impact open rates as an open can not be counted on an email with images suppressed. But this change will not be sudden and for some mailers may not be noticeable at all. This is because someone will have to have signed up with one of these accounts yesterday, then sign up with your program now. How much of an impact this will have on your program is completely dependent on three factors ...
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May
18
By Neil Schwartzman
Manager, Compliance and ISP Relations
In a vast sea of associations, The Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group is an interesting organization. Its focus is on preventing abuse of all sorts of messaging platforms, especially email. And it's also unique in that it takes a three-pronged approach to the problem: collaboration between receivers and senders, technology solutions and public policy. For all these reasons and more Return Path is proud to be an active MAAWG member.
In the spirit of receiver and sender collaboration, they yesterday announced the release of the "MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices." (There is also an executive summary of the document that helps to explain some of the more technical aspects in terms that marketers and executives are likely to understand.)
This document focuses on five core areas that are important for both marketers and operations professionals ...
Categories: Deliverability
May
08
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
When deliverability issues first began to surface back in 2003, many marketers turned immediately to their email service provider and said, essentially, "Hey, what gives? Why aren't you getting my email to the inbox?"
The irony is that the vast majority of the causes of deliverability problems have nothing to do with the service provider. As I wrote back in December, any reputable vendor has the basic sending infrastructure in place that will meet the requirements of ISPs and other receivers. I have stated many times in the past, in the majority of cases the fate of your email program was determined at the point of data collection. Why is that? Three reasons ...
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May
03
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
It's comforting to think of deliverability as a problem you can solve and be done with. And, in some cases, that can seem to be true. We have many clients that went from so-so inbox placement rates to nearly 100 percent across the board and, for the most part, stay there every campaign. But it takes work for that to happen.
The rules of the deliverability road can change without warning. Smart marketers must be prepared to react to those changing rules to ensure their delivery rates remain high.
Such was the case for one of our favorite clients, Overstock. ...
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May
02
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
We've written in the past about what senders can do to help fight spam and keep email a viable channel.
So we are happy to support the Direct Marketing Association as it takes a leadership position in urging marketers to join the conversation around email policies and practices. Which is why I'll be speaking later this month at their Email Policy Summit. ...
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Apr
25
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
How Receivers Think About Your Email
By George Bilbrey
I just got back from the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance Summit. It was really exciting to spend so much time discussing reputation and authentication with some of the smartest folks in the industry. If we are going to solve the spam problem and make inboxes safe for consumers and available to marketers, these are folks who are going to do it.
It was particularly exciting to see the interaction between the receiver representatives and large-scale marketers. One of our top clients actually said to my colleague Carmi Jones, "Now I get it!" - meaning, he now understands the interplay of reputation and authentication and how both contribute to inbox placement.
So, in the interest of helping you all "get it," here's some highlights of what's on the minds of top receivers ...
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Apr
19
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
Take your mind back to 2002. You were perhaps just becoming aware that sometimes the email you sent didn't make it where it was intended to go. Maybe you noticed your carefully crafted promotion went into the "junk" folder on your personal email account. Or you noticed a sudden dip in your metrics that wasn't attributable to the usual factors. You maybe started hearing about blacklists and thought, "Hmmm, is my email being blocked by ISPs? Are my customers not seeing what I send?" And figuring it out was far from clear.
Then along came Return Path with the radical idea that there should be a way for marketers to know what was actually happening to the email they sent to customers and prospects. They created what would become Sender Score Mailbox Monitor and the rest, as they say, is history. ...
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Apr
12
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
The ESPC recently released the results of a really great survey of email users and (among other things) how they use the "report spam" button that is available in many email user interfaces. The summary of the survey can be found here. The survey found 20 percent of respondents admit to using the "report spam" button to unsubscribe. I'm hearing a lot of different reaction to the 20% number ...
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Mar
26
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Janine Popick at Vertical Response has a great post on her blog about big-time retailers who use image-only email. The screen shots she provides are really stunning. The point I'd like to make is even if these emails had made it to the inbox, the response rates are likely to be low - consumers are too busy and process their email too quickly. If they don't see something compelling right away they delete and move on - and there is no way an email that is essentially blank can be compelling.
This is why it is so important to do pre-campaign checks ...
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Mar
13
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Over the past week, we have received questions from our clients who have heard about the Spamhaus amicus brief that we signed in the e360 case. We filed the brief after giving it serious consideration. In the end, there were three primary reasons for filing the brief:
Categories: Deliverability
Mar
08
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Complaint rates drive an email sender's reputation and the amount of email that make it into the inbox. While many other factors go into building email reputations, complaints have the most immediate impact - and provide the most actionable "reputation repair" guidance.
There are two primary ways to access complaints - through a robust reputation service like Sender Score Reputation Monitor and/or with the use of feedback loops to see who is complaining about you and what triggers those complaints. Using feedback loop (defined) data, senders can tell a lot about their programs. Is a particular data source leading to high complaints? Did a new campaign offend subscribers? By acting on the insights gleaned, we've seen clients reduce complaints rates by more than 50 percent.
Seeing this impact, we know feedback loops are critical for email marketers and this week announced our role in bringing more feedback loops to market. Return Path is now working with the receiver community to provide feedback loops for senders. This week, we launched the first one for USA.NET, the premier provider of hosted email and messaging services. Senders can apply at http://fbl.usa.net/. ....
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Feb
07
By Neil Schwartzman
Sender Score Certified Compliance
Recently, I wrote about the Spamhaus Policy Block List (PBL), suggesting senders encourage their network/connectivity service providers list their illegitimate email-sending IPs as a step towards improving the overall email stream on the internet.
The initial PBL was seeded with listings from the Dynablock NJABL ("Not Just Another Bogus List"), which at the time of the cut-over was at more than 1.9 million entries. (Dynablock is now considered to be moribund and will be taken down in due course.)
The organic uptake at Spamhaus has been phenomenal ...
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Feb
02
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
This week we announced a partnership with Bizanga, the global provider of a top-notch email processing platform, to increase the efficiency of sender verification for its service provider partners. Now, they will allow their customers to use the Sender Score Certified whitelist in addition to Sender Score Reputation Monitor data to vet incoming senders for the thousands of domains their technology covers.
This is great news for ISPs and other receivers using Bizanga, as their filtering options have just gotten stronger. The combination of Sender Score Certified and our reputation data allows receivers to vet all incoming email -- and block up to 60% -- just based on sender reputation. This allows them to decrease the amount of erroneously filtered email, as well. ...
Categories: Deliverability
Feb
02
By Neil Schwartzman
Sender Score Certified Compliance
I was at Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) conference this week and, as always, it was very interesting. Most enlightening was a conversation that George Bilbrey and I had with the head anti-spammer at a large receiving site. His sighed at one point and said, "Senders need to quit whining. We are busy fighting spam here!" While I thought it might not be a particularly politically correct or even polite thing to say, perhaps it is a message that needs to be relayed to senders.
The botnet situation is at a crisis point. If the receiving sites don't put all their resources into shoring up the defenses, there may well not be receiving sites to deliver to. ...
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Jan
24
By Matt J. McLaughlin
Software Engineer
As you may have read, Microsoft is soon launching a new version of Office which includes a new Outlook. This new version, called Outlook 2007, includes changes that are going to affect everyone sending email today.
The reason for this is that Microsoft has switched the Outlook rendering engine from Internet Explorer to Word. A rendering engine reads the HTML, rich text or plain text code and displays it in your email message, just like a browser displays a website.
What this means is that instead of displaying your HTML emails with a rendering engine that was designed to render web pages, Outlook will be using a scaled down version that has been included in Word for some time now. While Internet Explorer has seen a recent update to its rendering engine, Microsoft Word has not received the same treatment. This does not mean Outlook will not be able to display your HTML emails but it does mean you will have to change how you approach your email design and layout - in some cases radically.
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Jan
22
By Neil Schwartzman
Sender Score Certified Compliance
You may have heard recently about spammers sending out scads of their usual garbage with topical subject lines referring to the Chinese satellite issue, or the terrible storms taking place in Europe. These messages are actually Trojans intending to infect unwitting recipients. This is a typical social engineering trick to garner better open rates, a variance on subject lines like "About the meeting today" or "Dont understand, hope u can help."
But now, spammers have discovered a new tactic that has serious implications for the sender community. According to Symantec, spammers are now forging email to look like it is coming from the publishers of legitimate newsletters and email streams. Just as phishing has hampered financial services move into email, this type of spam will have serious negative impact on legitimate senders caught up in this deception.
There are a few steps you can take to mitigate any damage ...
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Jan
19
By Neil Schwartzman
Sender Score Certified Compliance
Last week I wrote about how the sender community needs to be engaged and involved in the fight against spam. In particular, anyone who cares about the future of email needs to be very concerned about spammers who use "zombie" computers to send their messages.
Many senders wonder what action steps they can take to help in this fight. Well, today Spamhaus launched a new Policy Block List that is intended to be a compendium of legitimate IP addresses. Want to help the global fight on zombies and botnets? Join the list.
The Spamhaus PBL is pretty simple. ...
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Jan
17
By Dan Deneweth
Director, Product Management
There has been a surge in discussion around email testing recently, and the steps marketers can take to optimize their email creative. While not directly related to email delivery rates, how an email renders in various email readers will have an impact on the overall effectiveness of an email campaign. For this reason, pre-campaign content testing should be part of any formal email marketing program. </
