Dec
16
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Authentication is an important component in creating a better and more secure email universe. Unfortunately, just say the word "authentication" and most email marketers' eyes glaze over. It sounds technical. It sounds boring. It sounds hard.
And yet it's important. While there aren't any ISPs today that are blocking email solely because the server isn't authenticated, it is absolutely one of the factors that influences deliverability. Unauthenticated servers are more suspicious. Over time we believe it will become an increasingly important factor and it is even possible that some receivers will outright block any email that isn't authenticated.
Because of this the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) made a smart (and bold!) statement when they required all member companies to authenticate their email. They knew it was the right stand to take for the industry.
Of course creating the requirement did not make it easier and the DMA knew that it would need to provide members with educational resources and innovative tools and services to get the job done. If legitimate companies aren't authenticating their email it is almost certainly because they need help, not because they don't think it's important.
Which is why last summer Return Path announced a partnership between the DMA and Return Path to create a registry to help DMA member companies verify the authentication of their email streams. The goal of this registry is to help DMA members quickly and easily determine whether or not their mailing IPs are authenticated. If they aren't in compliance, the registry gives DMA members the information they need to fulfill the authentication requirement.
And it is now live! ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Dec
11
Our new episode of Reputation Radio is available now on iTunes.
In this episode we interview Ken Takahashi about mobile marketing in the Asia Pacific region and the implications for U.S. marketers as mobile continues to grow here. Then, in our Cool Email Idea segment ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Dec
06
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
After more than a decade of fits and starts, fear and doubt, lies and lobbying, legislative attention towards spam now seems to arrive in regular waves. Our friend Dennis Dayman reports on deliverability.com that a new law has taken effect in Israel, requiring (in short) opt-in -- and so according to the International Herald Tribune, Israeli marketers were rushing to re-confirm questionable subscriptions before the deadline this past Monday. In Canada, Internet law expert Michael Geist lambasted his government for continuing to fail to pass any anti-spam legislation, four years after he and the National Task Force on Spam -- which also included our own Neil Schwartzman -- strongly urged them to take immediate action. And this week at the Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, I've heard representatives from more than a dozen governments from all over the world discussing not whether "cyber crime" legislation is necessary, but rather how it should be formulated to fit their local legal standards and culture.
Even in the United States, with both foes and supporters of the incoming administration waiting to learn what President Obama and his staff will do, there are clear signs that ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Dec
02
Raymond Gannon
Business Development Manager
As we continue to grow internationally at Return Path, we have joined ETIS, the global IT Association for Telecommunications. ETIS is a European organization which brings together the major telecommunications providers in Europe to share best-practices, create benchmarking data and form discussion groups on important technology issues.
I'm excited to be a part of this group and I believe that our participation ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Dec
01
By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst
My esteemed colleague J.D. Falk highlighted the results of a test done by our friends at MailChimp that shows that emailing to an old file caused complaints and unsubscribe to spike dramatically, and for opens and click rates to drop dramatically. No surprise, right?
Yet, if I was a marketer only focused on results, I'd look at this data another way. I'd say, "Hey - I got 7,688 clicks on the 'bad' list and only 6,925 clicks on the 'good' list. I doubled my bounty! So mailing the bad list was totally worth it! Let's do that again. Party on!"
How many of us have found ourselves struggling with this sort of situation? We know the best practice is to not email old files. We know the best practice is to refrain from emailing that extra campaign this week. However, at the same time we are under pressure to drive short term revenue. "The numbers are down, just send another email campaign." And it works - the extra email campaign drives revenue.
In this case, not following best practices generated a lot of traffic. The MailChimp study doesn't say if the old file clicks converted at the same rate, but let's assume that they were at least comparable. There was some gold in that there old file. Of course there was a lot of shiny rocks, too. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | Response
Nov
26
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
Over the past 35 years, scientific research has found that human beings and chimpanzees share approximately 94% of our DNA, the basic structures that define how we grow and evolve. This study caused a bit of a shock when it was released: our collective belief that we're vastly different from and superior to our hairier, dumber cousins was shaken.
But some research is less surprising, nearly as evident to we thinking beings as the use of tools. Earlier this week, our supremely intelligent partners Mail Chimp published the results of a study showing that mailing to an old or inactive list leads inexorably to complaints, unknown users, spamtraps -- all the ingredients of the kind of deliverability problem that'll cause the monkey in the mirror to jump up and down angrily. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Nov
21
Earlier this year we mentioned that Yahoo! would be joining Sender Score Certified. Well the time has arrived!
During the first week of January, Yahoo! will begin using Sender Score Certified status in their filtering decisions. This means that Sender Score Certified members will receive preferential treatment in reaching the inbox at Yahoo! Mail. This new benefit comes in addition to the long standing benefits at Hotmail, Cloudmark, IronPort, Road Runner, Cox, SpamAssassin, Barracuda, and dozens of other email networks worldwide. This is extremely exciting news for all of our Sender Score Certified members.
In fact, current members will begin ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Nov
20
By Melinda Plemel
Receiver Relationship Manager
We are very proud to announce the public release of a new feedback loop service for all BlueTie-hosted domains, including excite.com, iwon.com and myway.com. Other ISPs including Comcast, Cox, USA.net and Mailtrust have implemented feedback loops from Return Path and have seen complaints drop by 20-40%. We expect this feedback loop to result in a similar reduction in spam complaints and increased customer satisfaction. Excite previously offered a feedback loop, but BlueTie decided to outsource this service to Return Path and bring it up to industry standard best practices.
The feedback loop (FBL) service is available free of charge to approved parties sending email to BlueTie-hosted domains and will forward any mail reported as spam originating from the associated IP addresses back to the requested abuse email addresses defined during the FBL registration process.
The feedback loop is now available to...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Our new episode of Reputation Radio is available now on iTunes.
In this episode we interview Stephanie Miller about the findings from a recent Episilon-Return Path study of email marketing in the Asia Pacific region. Then ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Nov
19
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 ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
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