Where You Link Matters

by Matt Blumberg, CEO, Robert Barclay, Senior Product Manager and J.D. Falk, Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services

Late last week, well-known investor and blogger Fred Wilson posted an article about updates to the Zemanta content recommendation tool. "Now," Fred wrote, "if you have the Zemanta extension installed, when you go to gmail or yahoo mail, you'll see a button that says Zemanta that lets you use the content recommendation service while composing an email."

One of his readers, writing as BmoreWire, asked how those "pictures and recommended links affect the message's delivery in spam filter algorithms" -- so Fred asked us to weigh in. (Disclosure: Fred is an investor in both Zemanta and Return Path.)

As always, the answer is that it varies. Some spam filters pay a lot of attention to links or pictures in the message, while others mostly ignore it. The last time we studied it somewhat scientifically, link reputation impacted deliverability about 6% of the time, as compared with IP reputation at 77% and other content at 17%.

In most ISP situations, the reputation of ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Get Creative with Your Creative Again

By Larry Ellis
Manager of Business Development

You know the drill: You write great marketing copy for your email but avoid those pesky spam words like "FREE" or "click here" at all costs. What if you could stop worrying about getting blocked at the most important ISPs and focus all your attention on fun, creative copy that achieves your marketing goals? For reputable senders in the Sender Score Certified Program, you can start getting creative again.

Last week Yahoo! began using Return Path's Sender Score Certified whitelist. Yahoo!'s decision to begin using Sender Score Certified expands coverage for the largest email whitelist program available. Sender Score Certified covers more than 1.4 billion email inboxes worldwide, and enables ISPs to identify email from legitimate, qualified email senders and avoid accidentally blocking or delaying that email. In fact, Sender Score Certified now delivers more than ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Episode #6 of Reputation Radio is LIVE!

Our new episode of Reputation Radio is available now on iTunes.

In the first segment we talk with Wendy Croissant at Sierra Trading Post about a new daily deal newsletter that they launched with help from Return Path's Strategic Services team. Listen to Wendy, then read more about the program in this case study. In our second segment, Bonnie Malone from Return Path discusses the cool things that MarketingProfs does with their email newsletters.

Do you have a question for our email experts? Call ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Return Path's New Year Community Challenge: Week 3

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

This week's best practice is: Authenticate

Every marketer wants to be trusted, valued and welcome in the inbox. So it is always a top priority for the industry to ensure that legitimate marketers who follow best practices are clearly differentiated from spammers and fraudsters. Deceptive and fraudulent email caused by spoofing and phishing have become the top factors affecting online trust.

This is a problem for all of us to solve together. Fortunately, there are a few steps that you can take today to protect your brand so ISPs can welcome you into the inbox and so your customers can feel safe responding to your offers. The first of these - and perhaps the most straightforward for marketers - is authentication. All that means is that you validate that email you send is actually coming from you.

This column includes the benefits of authentication, the different types and which ISPs accept them and steps to authenticate your messages.

Authentication alone will not stop spam. Spammers can authenticate email, too. But it is integral to preventing phishing and other fraud. Its wide acceptance among ISPs has contributed to the acceptance of reputation and usage of third party whitelist programs as standards that drive the future of email. As a legitimate business, authentication should be seen as essential to securing your brand and online reputation. ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Spamming in Ireland Just Got Expensive

By Raymond Gannon
Director of Business Development, EMEA

According to the Irish Minister for Communications, Ireland now has one of Europe's most stringent anti-spam enforcement regimes in place. A new law in Ireland will now fine serious breaches up to 250,000 euros, or 10 percent of the offending company's turnover.

It is refreshing to see more governments around the world taking the spam issue seriously but only a tiny fraction of the spam received by Irish citizens is actually sent by Irish spammers. Unfortunately, even if Irish offenders are caught and prosecuted the problem will not go away because spamming is a global criminal activity. The organizations that get rich on sending spam are notoriously difficult to find and successful punishment is not an everyday affair, but without the necessary laws and appropriate fines, the legal battle on mail abuse is lost before it is even started. ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

One Billion Now Being Served

By Melinda Plemel
Receiver Relationship Manager

I drove by McDonald's this weekend and was surprised to see that they have 99 billion now being served. I remember when they went from 99 million to 1 billion and wondered how much higher it could go. Well, the number of those that eat at McDonald's continues to grow but let's leave that discussion for another time.

The real news in our industry is the fact that we've passed the 1 billion mark on internet users. In an article written in CircleID last week, they have stated that there are over 1 billion unique users on the internet. One billion?? The number seems unreal but if we look at it more closely, that only encompasses 15 - 20% of the world's population, which doesn't seem like a lot. ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Data Privacy Day 2009!

By Tom Bartel
Chief Privacy Officer

You may not have heard but today, January 28, 2009, is Data Privacy Day. Folks across the United States, Canada, and 27 European countries are celebrating Data Privacy Day together for just the second time ever.

As a privacy advocate, of course I love the idea of Data Privacy Day. Other than International Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19), this is my new, favorite holiday-that-I-don't-get-the-day-off day.

I've enjoyed this years' many annual predictions made for the email marketing industry (including those of Return Path's own Matt Blumberg) this year, and while I enjoy those predictions, I never make any of my own. But, in the spirit of Data Privacy Day, I will predict that 2009 will be the year that email marketers truly recognize and embrace privacy as a critical component of their program success.

I'm not sure how bold of a prediction or statement that really is. I recognize that many of us in the email industry are already best practitioners when it comes to data protection and privacy issues. But, in a world where the online services landscape continues to evolve and shift with remarkable speed, in particular with social networks, younger demographics and the mobile marketplace - email marketers should be compelled to pay more attention to privacy concerns of their users. As consumers online continue to partake of current, new, free, and innovative web services in the market, they also expect very clear transparency regarding their user data and how it is used.

So, if you didn't know it was Data Privacy Day around the world, it isn't too late to celebrate and honor it. Here are a few simple suggestions ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Yahoo! Deja Vu

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

I worked as an anti-spam product manager at Yahoo! for a few years, and (among other things) designed their Complaint Feedback Loop -- both the initial long-running "beta" implementation, and many improvements which (for various reasons) never made it past the design phase. Then when it came time to try my hand at something else, I moved to Return Path and immediately became involved in designing the Yahoo! Complaint Feedback Loop signup interface we announced last week, in partnership with my old friends and colleagues in Sunnyvale.

I must admit to feeling some trepidation when I found myself working on this same product once again. Albert Einstein is said to have defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" -- and that's exactly what I was doing. I'd been involved in creating the Hotmail Junk Mail Reporting system -- their complaint feedback loop -- around 2003, and worked on a handful of others more recently here at Return Path. Frankly, for me, complaint feedback loops -- from the ISP side -- are very old hat.

What's kept me relatively sane is that each time, there's something different. We had a lot of fun talking over the ramifications of Yahoo!'s choice to route complaints based on authenticated domain rather than the last-hop IP address like most. This time, most of the industry has a better sense of how DK and DKIM work, so the questions you've been asking are different.

Without a doubt, the most common question thus far has been: what happens if you'd previously subscribed to Yahoo!'s "old" feedback loop? Easy: that'll continue to work...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Return Path's New Year Community Challenge: Week 2

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

This week's best practice is: Keep Your List Clean

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, a fact that is no less true when it comes to email lists. In fact, list hygiene issues are one of the top five factors that can lead directly to deliverability failures.

Broadly speaking, list hygiene is a process of cleaning bad addresses off your list on a regular basis. Bad addresses fall into three buckets:

Unknown users: These are email addresses that have been turned off - the person left that job or canceled their account. Unknown user accounts generally report back as a hard bounce and should be taken off your file immediately.

Inactive addresses: Inactive addresses fall into two categories. The first are addresses that are still in use by someone, are not unresponsive because they are no longer interested in your messages. The second category is addresses that have been abandoned but not closed. You will not receive a bounce message. There is no way, from your metrics reports, to know which category your inactive addresses fall into.

Spam traps: A spam trap is an address that was created specifically to catch senders who harvest records or attempt dictionary attacks ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Yahoo! Feedback Loop News

By Alex Rubin
Vice President, Business Development

I am extremely excited to be able to announce the launch a new Yahoo! feedback loop powered by Return Path. We now provide feedback loop services for more than 60% of the of the largest internet service providers (ISPs), including Comcast, Cox, USA.net, and Mailtrust.

And, the launch of the Yahoo! feedback loop paves the way for full integration of Yahoo! onto Sender Score Certified ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability | News