Whitelisting programs like the Return Path Certification program are the latest development in the war against spam, phishing and online fraud. Most experts agree that spam accounts for a huge percentage of email sent and that volumes continue to rise. These huge volumes of spam frustrate consumers but also create serious problems for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email marketers.

Email whitelisting programs are designed to provide senders, receivers (ISPs) and consumers with a trusted solution that helps them effectively identify legitimate mail and provide improved delivery of your email to the inbox. Certification ensures that legitimate email gets delivered, while allowing ISPs to aggressively target spam without the concern of blocking the permission-based email consumers want.

Anti-spam filters are great at catching most unwanted email. However they don’t differentiate very well between spam and permission-based messages. While the customer encounters less spam in their inbox, there is also an alarming number of false positives where legitimate messages are blocked by the filter. So, while filtering will reduce spam in the inbox, it is not by itself a deliverability solution.

Return Path works directly with leading ISPs and spam filters to ensure optimum delivery to the inbox. Return Path believes that best practice reigns above all. If you are a good sender that works hard at providing relevant email to people who want to receive it, then you should naturally reap the rewards of being a good sender. Certification is a trusted means by which receivers can make better filtering decisions and provide special benefits for senders who continually comply with the rigorous standards imposed by the program by following universal best practices when sending their mail.

Safe senders have proven to be trustworthy and responsible entities that meet the rigorous standards required by the program. By becoming a Safe sender, you are identifying yourself to the receiver world and receive preferential treatment at over 300 million inboxes. Some Safe senders, whose email performance ranks you among the "best of the best", receive the expanded benefits of Certified as well. IP addresses on the Certified list provide the additional benefit of preferential treatment at over 1.8 billion inboxes worldwide including Yahoo! and Hotmail and leading cable providers and ISPs. View all the program benefits, including having images and links automatically enabled at Hotmail and Yahoo!

In order to become a member of the Return Path Certification program, participating senders must meet vigorous standards every day. This means, for every sender, that:  

1. Email is sent from a dedicated IP address.
2. Email messages accurately identify the source of the message.
3. There is full disclosure and consent at the point of collection of email addresses that clearly describes how the sender will use the email addresses and/or other personal information
4. The recipient has given explicit consent to receiving any Commercial or Promotional Email Messages.
5. Recipients are promptly removed from the list when they request to unsubscribe.
6. The email infrastructure is well maintained and operated responsibly.
7. Reasonably secure networks used to send email messages and store recipient information.
8. Their email programs maintains very low complaint rates.

For senders, there are two pricing components - Application Fee and License Fee. Pricing is based on your monthly email volume.

Non-Profit class is only available for organizations with monthly email volume of 250,000 messages or less. For non-profits above this volume level, the organization is treated as commercial.

The application fee is non-refundable. Your application fee covers the cost of reviewing your application and a comprehensive review of your email program. This review provides you with specific action items that will improve your reputation metrics and later qualify you for the certification program. If you choose to re-apply in the future, you will be charged a new application fee.

No. The application fee can only be paid with a credit card.

This fee covers Return Path’s expense of day to day management of the service, and to making improvements to the program.

The terms of the program are covered by a signed license agreement. For a copy of the license agreement, download the Sender Evaluation Kit.

Email senders and receivers both participate in the certification program. Once a sender is accepted, their outgoing email IP addresses are added to the Safe list and the Certified list if they qualify. When an email is sent, the receiving ISP or corporation performs a standard DNS query on the sending IP address, if the IP is on the whitelist, the email is delivered to the inbox. There are no technical adjustments, software installations or other set-up requirements once your email program has been certified by Return Path.

Acceptance requires a thorough examination of your email infrastructure, email list quality, collection and unsubscribe processes. A good starting point for most businesses is to honestly answer the following questions:

• Is your email infrastructure maintained according to industry standards?
• Do you have strong security for the networks used to send email?
• Are your email program complaint rates very low?
• Do you have an automated list hygiene and bounce-processing system?
• Do you have an unsubscribe option for every commercial email message?
• Do your subject lines accurately reflect the content of your message?
• Are your unsubscribe processes in compliance with CAN-SPAM?

If you can answer “yes” to some or all of these questions, your business may well be qualified for certification. Find out by taking our prequalification quiz and by the Return Path Certification Evaluation Kit. If you pass the quiz and meet most (if not all ) of the requirements identified in the kit, then you are ready to apply.

Members must adhere to a strict set of industry standards for permission-based email communication. These standards were established by Return Path in partnership with TRUSTe, an independent, non-profit organization dedicated protecting consumers. The first step to becoming a member is to take the prequalification quiz to see if you are ready to apply. Secondly, you should download the Return Path Certification Evaluation Kit to learn more about the program and access the pre-application checklist and important pricing information

When you are ready, you can apply online for the certification program. Once your application has been submitted, a representative from our Member Services team will review your application and monitor how your IP addresses perform at major ISPs and email receivers. IPs will be specifically monitored for reputation metrics including complaint rates, unknown user rates, spam traps and blacklists. At the end of the application process, Return Path will provide you with a review of your email program and review this with you.

Once accepted, members sign the license agreement and pay the annual license fee. Your IP addresses are then active on the Safe list. And, if they perform well on the reputation metrics, the IPs will also be included on the Certified list. You will gain access to Return Path’s Customer UI where you can view how each IP address is performing against the reputation metrics. The website also contains all the information you need to maintain best practices and ensure your IP addresses stay in good standing. If an IP address ceases to meet the strict standards for Certified senders, the IP address will be removed from the Certified list but still be included on the Safe list. However, IP addresses can be suspended from both lists if they fail to meet minimum program requirements.

If you know your email program will not qualify, Return Path offers a range of audits and improvement plans that can get your email program on the right track. It’s not easy but with the help of our deliverability experts we can diagnose the root cause(s) of the metrics that are driving down your reputation and design practical solutions for your business. To learn more about our deliverability consulting services, please visit: http://www.returnpath.net/commercialsender/professional/deliverability/

Currently, in order to become sender certified, you must send your email from a dedicated (i.e., unshared) IP address or set of IP addresses. Your organization may control this itself, or another organization may already provide it for you. If you are not sure if you have a dedicated IP address, please contact your Email Service Provider (ESP) or Internet Service Provider (ISP). Shared IP addresses cannot be certified because they are used by multiple different entities. Since the program standards include things like disclosure and proper list hygiene that will vary from sender to sender, we cannot certify that IP based on one sender alone.

Typically we want to see 90 Days of mailing history on the IPs they would like to get certified.  In certain circumstances we can review traffic on past IPs to vet for certification.

The end customer is the certified entity so in most cases we can just add their new IP addresses to the certification program once they start mailing from them. 

Yes, provided the customer was using a dedicated IP at their last ESP.

Even the best anti-spam solutions accidentally block legitimate email your customers want to receive in their inbox. Use the certification program DNS server just like a blacklist server to eliminate false positives. This method is simple to implement and does not require any additional hardware or software. The certification whitelists work with all common email gateways (MTA’s) and anti-spam solutions.

Certification support is native within the code of many branded receiving and filtering mail applications.  If not, the DNS lists are easy to implement because they use the same DNS query syntax as other DNSBL and DNSWL.  The only thing to remember is the DNSBL is a block instruction; and the DNSWL is the inverse, a pass instruction.

Both are whitelists, but because they have different origins and different pedigree, senders on one list are not necessarily on the other.  Query both for inbox placement as both are whitelists for only legitimate permission based senders. 

Regarding special rules, look at businesses on the Safe list as legitimate business enterprises that follow best practices and use well configured, authenticated servers.  Use the Certified list as a way to provide special treatment for the senders that measure up to the very best standards, and provide these senders with the privilege of turning gif’s and images on.

A receiver’s application simply performs an “a” record lookup (DNS Query) on the IP address in question and using rules based logic, then passes the message(s) “upstream” with an instruction to either whitelist and deliver the message to the inbox, or blacklist instructing the message to be blocked by either bouncing the message or placing it in the bulk folder.

Both the Safe list and the Certified list may be queried openly across public DNS.