Another Successful MAAWG

By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services

Over the past five years, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) meetings have brought together many of the world's experts in email spam, botnets, cybercrime, and related issues. Last week, 270 participants from more than 19 countries met in Amsterdam, in The Netherlands.

Like nearly all computer security conferences, there's a strict policy that information shared within MAAWG is confidential -- so, unlike most marketing conferences, you won't see anyone twittering or blogging the highlights. (We got permission to post this.) A few participants reported on Facebook that there was a fascinating session about "[REDACTED]" (sic), but no other details have been made available. This difference in style shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has spent time with ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Delivered May Not Mean To the Inbox

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

It's no surprise that email marketers are often confused about the difference between a bounce rate and an inbox deliverability rate. Most email broadcast systems in the U.S. and Europe report something called "delivered." It's usually a pretty high number - like 98% or 93%. And your ESP would like you to judge them on that number, because it's really high, and it's easy for them to be confident that it will stay high.

The problem is that most vendors define "delivered" as the inverse of your bounce rate - the number of records on your file that either no longer exist (a hard bounce) or are having temporary delivery failure (a soft bounce), perhaps due to an out of office reply or a full mailbox or some glitch in the ISP server.

Most marketers who keep their lists clean and have good permission practices have a bounce rate of 1%-5%. Even if you outsource your bounce handling to your ESP, you are still responsible for how they manage the removal of names - so be sure you understand what they are doing on your behalf. Your bounce rate is a good number to have included in your reports. It tells you something about your list hygiene. But it tells you nothing about what happens to your emails. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

What you don't know can hurt you in email marketing

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

Later this month, we will be releasing the results of a survey of European email marketers. However, one finding was so worrisome (and astonishing) that I wanted to gauge your reaction now. It seems that there is a woeful lack of knowledge and understanding among email marketers for how to get past the spam filters, reach the inbox and earn a response - what is known as "inbox deliverability."

According to our survey of several hundred European email marketers (which will be released in full later this year), too few marketers have deep enough knowledge about the causes of delivery failure and the rewards of success to manage and optimize their inbox delivery. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Demand Accurate Deliverability Data!

By Dennis Malaspina
Regional Director

Here at Return Path we talk a lot about how good deliverability yields great response. The concept is so simple to us that we find it a little hard to believe that some marketers still don't monitor deliverability. Unfortunately, some marketers think they have all the information they need to accurately measure the success of their program, but the problem lies with the data they are receiving. It's just not complete. Most marketers are looking at simple bounce reports and making assumptions that their email reached the inbox. Unfortunately, the email that didn't bounce may be delivered to the junk folder or be blocked completely - a purgatory state that we call "missing."

To understand this problem, you need a comprehensive email delivery report to truly gauge the impact of your email marketing program. If your reports don't tell you what percentage of your email was placed in the inbox or junk folder and what percentage went missing in cyberspace, your analysis is flawed.

Wouldn't you like to know the truth about your email program? Consider this. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

OTA Proposes Online Trust Principles

By Tom Bartel
Chief Privacy Officer

In our recent webinar with the FTC we confirmed that the agency is open to continued industry self-regulation - as long as they see some action. I suspect that like me, most of us in the email industry prefer the self regulation ideal. We took the opportunity with our conversation with the FTC to point out many examples of how our industry works together to build and maintain trust in email with consumers.

We continue to have an opportunity as service providers and industry associations, to lead our industry by setting and adopting realistic best practices guidelines that businesses can implement. The email and advertising industries are graced with numerous agencies and associations doing just that, including the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), the Direct Marketing Association, the Email Experience Council, the Email Sender and Provider Coalition, Network Advertising Initiative and the Internet Advertising Bureau, to name a few. Each of these existing industry associations have produced best practice guidance that has resonated with us and helped us manage our businesses properly. The latest effort comes from the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) who has just released a timely draft of Online Trust Principles for public comment.

The thing about any set of principles, and these from the OTA are no exception ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Is Email Impacting the Environment?

By Larry Ellis
Manager of Business Development

I recently ran across an article in the New York Times titled Spam and Global Warming?. Trust me, I was skeptical about this, how could email really be impacting our environment? The article was extracted from The Carbon Footprint of E-mail Spam Report published by McAfee which had some interesting information about the environmental impact of unwanted email.

I have always believed that email is generally free for the sender, but expensive for the recipient. But thinking about it as an irresponsible use of global resources was something that I just hadn't done before. Unfortunately, McAfee's research methodology has been called into question - seriously by spamnation and hysterically in a column by Ken Magill.

But even if spam does not contribute to global warming - at least not in a way that can be quantified ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Permission is Not Enough

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

A digital marketer in France said to me the other day, "I don't need to worry about inbox deliverability, I have permission." I was shocked that this myth could be so firmly held by an otherwise smart and savvy email marketer. "Do you stop trying to earn a second sale just because you made the first?" I said. "Doesn't what you send and how you treat subscribers after they give you permission have anything to do with subscriber satisfaction?" He paused, and then agreed.

After all, it's subscriber satisfaction, not permission, that earns our place in the inbox and gives us a chance for a response and revenue. And subscriber satisfaction is all about the experience we create with every message, over time.

Consider that ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

How to Steal Reputation

by J.D. Falk, Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services

Much as the term "pre-header" is now locked into email marketing parlance even though what it describes is neither pre- nor header, the term "reputation hijacking" continues to spread through the anti-spam community and the press.

"Reputation hijacking" is intended to describe when a spammer or other bad actor uses someone else's system -- usually one of the large webmail providers -- to send their spam. The idea is that in doing so, they're hijacking the reputation of the webmail provider's IPs instead of risking the reputation of IPs under their own control. But I really have to laugh (though mostly out of sadness) whenever this technique is described as something new.

The first spam I dealt with, way back in the mid-nineties, was sent by a user on a shell server. So was nearly all of the other spam of that era. Some was sent via Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, etc., but it was all from what today we'd call an individual end user's email account.

Then some of the spammers realized they could get dedicated servers -- and that worked for a while. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

One New Name, Two Levels of Trust

By Daniel Deneweth
Sr. Director, Certification

We have some exciting news to share today about certification services from Return Path.

We have incorporated two different programs - Sender Score Certified and SafeList (formerly from Habeas) - into one program called Return Path Certification. By combining these two programs, Return Path has developed the largest and most respected whitelist program in the email universe that is based on this key premise - if you can trust the sender, you can trust their mail.

For senders to participate in the program, they need only complete one application to be considered for Return Path Certification's two levels of trust - Safe and Certified. To gain entry to our Safe level, senders must pass an audit of their email permission practices, privacy policy and legal compliance and show that they only send email from properly configured and authenticated servers. Then, companies whose reputation metrics identify them as "the best of the best" qualify for an automatic upgrade to the Certified level and gain access even more inboxes for no extra charge. Certified members also get special privileges like automatically enabled images and links at Windows Live Mail. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Wait, what do you do?

By Melinda Plemel
Receiver Relationship Manager

I was recently at a big family reunion where I caught up with many relatives, some that I had not seen in more than twenty years. Of course one of the first couple of questions I was asked was what I do for a living. Well, it's easy to answer that question to people that work in the industry, but to the rest of the world it can be tricky.

Four years ago, when I began working with Return Path, I would describe the company by saying, "We are an email services company. We help businesses get their email delivered to people that want it, and help internet service providers better understand who is a good sender and who isn't".

The conversation would continue as follows: ...

Categories: Email Deliverability