AOL's Plans for Domain Reputation

By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products

With every new technology, there are a few people who fully grok not only where it stands now, but where it's going -- who will be using it, and how. In our case, these are people whose thinking about reputation is so far ahead of the rest of the industry that if we would have had them as speakers at our IN conference a few weeks ago, and they revealed their visions of the future, everyone's heads would have exploded!

One of these is my friend Mike Adkins, who works on authentication and reputation for AOL. AOL has always been a leader in the industry, and Mike and I -- along with Dave Crocker, and other smart folks -- have been talking about the inevitable and much-needed intersection of authentication and reputation at MAAWG for the past few years. One of the recurring difficulties with this or any complex new technology is that it's new: there are no existing "best practices" and everyone is worried about making the first mistakes. Mike's fed up with this -- as are we all -- and he has decided to put a sharp wooden stake into the heart of the problem. Recently, he's been talking very candidly with the industry about AOL's future plans. The plans may change, he says, but this is their starting point -- and anyone who wants to continue sending mail to AOL's subscribers, or to understand the direction the rest of the industry is likely to take, needs to pay attention.

I tend to get overly wordy and perhaps somewhat theoretical when talking about this topic, so Return Path's marketing team has condensed what we understand of AOL's plan into a few simple bullet points ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

New Research Study: How the Unsubscribe Process Impacts Sender Reputation

By Bonnie Malone
Director, Strategic Services

In June we published a research study on how top brands manage the sign-up and welcome experience for their subscribers. As you might recall, our findings were rather shocking. Big, well-known brands were falling down on what many email marketing experts consider basic best practices. We decided to re-visit those same companies and see if they handled the unsubscribe experience any better. Download this new study now.

The good news is that most of the companies studied had the basics in place. They may not have optimized their experience, but they at least stopped sending email quickly.

The bad news is that, again, we were shocked to discover ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Fight or Flight? Dealing With Marketing Stress

By Chad Malchow
VP, New Business Development

Whether or not you believe we are in or heading to a recession, you most likely believe we are in times of uncertainty. If you are like the many clients I have talked to over the past few months, your budget has been frozen or cut. You still have goals to meet and now you need to meet them with fewer funds. This is not a fun or easy place for you to be in. The question is how will you react to this marketing stress. Will you fight or flee?

I hope everyone reading this chooses to fight. I hope you choose to make your own luck rather than waiting for luck to find you. I hope you choose to find a way to make more with less. These times of uncertainty are times of opportunity. An opportunity for you to shine. An opportunity for your business to not only exist, but grow.

If you are still reading, you chose to fight. Good for you! In order to fight and move forward ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

IN Panel: The Future of Messaging Moderated by Matt Blumberg

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Strategic Services

[Ed note: This is the final blog on our IN Conference sessions. Do to some technical issues -- and a late night on Thursday -- it's a little later than the rest.]

The last panel session of the day was moderated by Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg and included Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures. Fred has been in the VC space since 1987, was the founder of Flatiron Partners and was recently recognized as the #1 most influential insider in the New York tech scene by Silicon Alley Insider.

Also on the panel were Tom Evslin, the inventor of the "Blok" which delivers books in serial format via blog postings, and Phil Hollows, the CEO of Feedblitz, a leading independent RSS to email alert service.
The session really took the form of an informal chat between four messaging gurus and it was fascinating to hear them talk about email: its past, present and future.

Matt kicked off the discussion by stating that email isn't just evolving - it's "turbo-evolving." Over the last 20 years, new forms of messaging and communication have rapidly expanded. So where does that leave users, subscribers and marketers?

Before the gurus answered that question, Matt posed some questions to the audience using the Perception Analyzer tool. Those included ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

It's Not Rock and Roll, But We Like It: The Return Path Podcast

We are pleased and proud to announce the launch of Reputation Radio, the Return Path podcast. It's a whole new way to experience the expertise and thought leadership you've come to expect from Return Path. We'll be podcasting every two weeks.

In this week's episode you'll hear George Bilbrey and Robert Barclay discussing our Reputation Benchmark Report and Bonnie Malone sharing a cool email idea from eBay. Future episodes will feature our experts talking about spam traps, mobile marketing, international email trends and much, much more. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode.

Here's three fun, creative ways to enjoy Reputation Radio: ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Reputation Is No Longer Black and White

Comcast recently announced they are using Sender Score as a factor in determining if you are eligible to participate in their feedback loop program.

Basically, if you pass their threshold for "good" (Sender Score above 60), you're in. If you appear below their threshold for "bad" (Sender Score below 30), you're out. And if you are in-between (Sender Score between 30 and 60), they'll factor in additional elements to determine your eligibility.

Reputation has evolved quite a bit in the receiver world. Not too long ago, the first reputation systems only gave binary answers. Most classified senders as bad (meaning they'd be blocked), or not bad (and thus not blocked) according to their own criteria. Others followed the model of ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Is Your Email an Invited Guest or a Drunken Frat-boy?

By Neil Schwartzman
Director of Standards and Security, Sender Score Certified Compliance

I have been thinking about the analogy between the email inbox and the postal mailbox we all have. It doesn't work.

It is true that the inbox is a replacement for where we receive news about friends, since handwritten letters seem to have been all but replaced by email (and to a lesser degree, instant messages, and text messaging).

But the inbox isn't your mailbox, it is your living room, a far more intimate and personal space. It is where your friends can drop by unannounced, and invited guests are welcome.

Now, when an invited guest comes into my home ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

The Root of All Email

By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products

This week, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published a number of what they call "RFCs," which originally meant "Requests for Comment" -- the standards documents which specify the technical underpinnings of the internet. Two of these, numbered 5321 and 5322, replace earlier documents defining the very core of internet email. On the surface, each of these seem surprisingly simple; one aims "...to transfer mail reliably and efficiently," while the other defines itself as "...a definition of what message content format is to be passed between systems." Yet without general industry-wide acceptance of (and compliance with) these standards, internet email simply would not exist.

This week also marks ten years since the death of Jon Postel, who arguably had more influence over the creation of the internet than any other single person. One of Jon's most enduring recommendations is ...Tell me more

Categories: Email Deliverability

Before You Get Famous Protect Your Email Account

By Neil Schwartzman
Director of Standards and Security, Sender Score Certified Compliance

By now, you have likely heard about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin having joined the redoubtable ranks of famous people like Paris Hilton and Chester Charlie Bennington (the lead singer of Linkin Park) whose email accounts have been hacked.

Like the Alaskan tundra, the Internet can be a scary, cold, dangerous place. But if the proper precautions are taken, risk of obvious dangers can be reduced significantly. So, whether you've been thrust into the spotlight recently or not, we'd like to nominate the following precautions and hope they get your vote ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Why The Rules Have to Be Flexible

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

We have clients ask us all the time - how much email should I be sending out to my subscribers? One a week? One a month? And usually, we give the same advice - it depends on what you are sending, and on what expectation you set with your subscribers when they sign up.

This week is a great example that proves the rule "it depends." I get the Wall Street Journal's email alerts of major headlines. I think I've subscribed in two different categories, maybe three - I can't remember, since I signed up about 10 years ago. In a typical week, across all the categories, I might get ...Tell me more

Categories: Email Deliverability

Asia Diary Day 3: Reviewing Spam Laws in Shanghai

During our APAC tour (previously written about here and here), we became more aware of interesting local laws attempting to legislate against spam. Please don't interpret this as an official legal position (we aren't lawyers, international or otherwise), but check out these policies:

Singapore: Marketers must mark their messages with the letters "ADV" for advertisement to make it easier for a consumer to direct unwanted mail to the electronic trash bin. Singapore supports "opt-out" mailing - a generally lower bar than requiring "opt-in." If a consumer opts not to receive ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Join us for IN: The Email Reputation Conference

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

By now every marketer understands that email that doesn't make it to the inbox doesn't generate response. And most marketers also understand that the key to getting to the inbox is having a stellar sender reputation.

If it's that simple why does so much opt-in, commercial email still not get into the inboxes of the customers who requested it?

Because while sender reputation is a simple concept ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Why it doesn't matter that the Virginia anti-spam law was struck down

By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products

If the headlines are to be believed, spam is now entirely legal in Virginia and anyone can send whatever they want without any fear of reprisal, ever. Looking beyond the headlines, it appears that the Virginia Supreme Court's ruling in AOL's case against formerly convicted spammer Jeremy Jaynes declares that the Virginia anti-spam law violates the Constitutional protection of anonymous speech, and thus is null and void.

So, are legitimate companies now permitted to send spam? Do the criminals get to run loose in the streets, advertising their wares openly? Are we about to suffer an increase in spam that makes 2007 look like 1977?

Of course not. ...Tell me more

Categories: Email Deliverability

Asia Diary Day 2: Meeting Receivers in Beijing

Last week I wrote about a deliverability seminar in Singapore with some of APAC's top senders. During our Asia tour we also had a roundtable session with many of the top ISPS in China and Yahoo & Microsoft. The spirit of the session was a chance to improve communication and collaboration in the ISP community.

This is a brief summary of some of the comments expressed by these members of the Chinese ISP community:

• They have general problems with communication outside the region. Most of their interest is finding contacts and opening channels of communication to resolve network block issues. They want to know internal blacklist criteria and urge transparency. ...Tell me more

  Categories: Email Deliverability

Asia Diary Day 1: Meeting Senders in Singapore

Return Path recently co-hosted a deliverability seminar series in Asia titled "The Truth about Email Deliverability - How Reputation Impacts Email Deliverability." I thought it might be interesting to share some of our experiences interacting with email senders in this large and growing region that is still learning how to interact with the rest of the internet community.

My big takeaway is that the APAC marketing community isn't yet focused on deliverability and reputation so they are lagging the rest of the world in addressing these issues. Deliverability is still a relatively new concept for these senders. They are just beginning to understand that their subscribers are probably not receiving 20% of their emails.

But expect that to change - and quickly - as internet usage is exploding in the region.

Here are some real quotes from legitimate senders (e.g., large banks, airlines and newspaper publishers) from the audience ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Cooler Idea: A Reader Offers Thoughts on Whitelisting

We love it when a cool idea fuels inspiration for more cool ideas.

One of our readers, Paul Broni of Inbox Interactive, wrote this in response to last week's cool idea from Travelocity:

Why not take it one step further?

You know from the domain which set of instructions the recipient needs. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

It's Not Just You: Where All Those 'cnn.com' Emails Come From

By Neil Schwartzman
Director of Standards and Security, Sender Score Certified Compliance

By now, you have doubtless seen the CNN "news alert" spam using legitimate news story headlines infesting the inboxes of tens of millions of people. There are variations also claiming to be from MSNBC from the same bot network, Storm, and the BBC, on a botnet called Mega-D. No doubt they will morph again to use other social engineered subject lines to trick unwitting people into clicking the links contained within. It is a virus, and more proof that spam 2.0 -- the merging of spammers with virus-makers and spyware writers -- exists. They are unfortunately very good at what they do.

Our friends at MX Logic track this stuff really well, and one of the botnets spewing out this junk was going full throttle at 11 million pieces of spam per hour.

These are all attempts to grow the zombie networks by sending out emails that will infect the computer of anyone who clicks the payload link.

Our inbound spam filtering at Return Path has been ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Opportunity Knocks

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

When our friends at Habeas announced that they were exploring a sale of the company a few months back, we were intrigued. While fiercely competing in the marketplace does create some degree of tension or even mistrust between two companies, that activity also creates a lot of common ground for discussion about the market and the future.

So we are very excited today to announce that we are acquiring Habeas in a deal that is signed and should close within a couple weeks. Cutting through all the PR platitudes, here's what this deal really means for our stakeholders:

For everyone we work with, this deal means we have even more scale. More scale is a good thing. It means we can invest more in our future in everything from technical infrastructure, to product innovation, to globalization, to employee development. It's easy to be great when you're a 25 person company. It's actually quite challenging when you're a 50-100 person company. It becomes easier again, though in different ways, when you are a 200 person company with more resources.

For ISPs and filters, more scale means more and better data products to help fine tune filtering algorithms and improve member experience. It also means an even more streamlined way to reach masses of marketers and publishers.

For sender clients, we can now offer ...

Categories: Email Deliverability | News

A View of The Email Universe: Return Path's Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report

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:

1. Most of the servers sending email shouldn't be. Only 20% of the IPs we studied were ...Tell me more

   Categories: Email Deliverability

Case Study: Web 2.0 Runs on Email

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

AOL Feedback Loop Gets a Makeover

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: Email Deliverability

Reminder: New CAN-SPAM Rules Take Effect on July 7

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: Email Deliverability

MAAWG's Latest Documents Improve Accuracy of Reputation Systems

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. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Yahoo! Adds Two New Email Domains

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Return Path is Headed to MAAWG

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Anatomy of Forged Spam

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Drawing the Line: Where We Come out

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Drawing the Line: Your Thoughts

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

The Comcast Feedback Loop is Available Exclusively from Return Path

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. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Drawing the Line

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:

• Gambling
  
• Tobacco
  
• Neutriceuticals
  
• Guns
  
• Adult content or products

Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different.  But common threads run through all three dimensions. 

Categories: Email Deliverability

Partner Case Study: Deliverability Win at Blue Sky Factory

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. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Let the Phone Gather Dust; Brush off the Spreadsheet Instead

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?

Categories: Email Deliverability

Court Affirms Comcast's Right to Keep Inboxes Safe from Spam

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. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Trust in Email Begins with Authentication

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Get Fresh, New Email Ideas: Expert Seminars

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 ...

Categories: Acquisition | Email Deliverability | Response

JupiterResearch: Marketers Focus on the Wrong Stuff?

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Worried About Deliverability? Focus on Relevance

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Why Does Return Path Spend So Much Time Working Within Industry Organizations?

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:

Categories: Email Deliverability

What Do You Really Know About Your Inbox Deliverability?

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Authentication, Reputation & Accreditation: The Three Pillars of Email Deliverability

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

New Sender Score Features Arm Marketers with Enhanced Data to Make Smarter Decisions about their Email Campaigns

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:

Categories: Email Deliverability

Return Path's Partnership with Cloudmark Puts Email Subscribers First

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Sender Score Certified Now Covers 1.2 Billion Inboxes

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

AOL Changes Authentication and Whitelist Standards

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

A Belated 2007 Year in Review with a Look Ahead to 2008

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Spammer indictment is good news for the email industry

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."

Categories: Email Deliverability

Changing your IP Address to Combat Holiday Traffic?

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:

Categories: Email Deliverability

Sender Score Receiver Alliance Welcomes Four New Members

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Don't Expect Your ESP to Have the Magic Wand for Solving Your Deliverability Issues

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...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Get a Grip on your Handheld

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.

Categories: Email Deliverability

How to Impress the ISPs

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. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Thoughts on Six Sigma Deliverability

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:

1. Define your goals (e.g., "inbox placement of 100% at the following ISPs: ...")
   
2. Measure deliverability
   
3. Analyze - find the root cause of the delivery problem
   
4. Improve the root cause of the delivery problem and
   
5. Keep those root causes under control
   

Categories: Email Deliverability

Bridging the Divide

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Case Study: Coordinated Efforts Wins the Day for Orvis

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." ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Reputation and Content Filtering: The Big Differences

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Data-Driven Deliverability

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? ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Bolstering Authentication in the Direct Marketing Community

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). ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Render Me This: Solving the Riddle of Image Suppression

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...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Hotmail Images and Links Automatically Enabled for Sender Score Certified Email

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? ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Great Resource for Email Designers

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Permission Encore: No Reason Not to Verify

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. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Is opt-in permission really enough?

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. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Is Permission Still Relevant?

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. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

MAAWG Best Practices: Where to Focus Your Attention

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

DomainKeys Identified Email Becomes Standard

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? ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Why You Need to Pay Attention to Reputation

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability