Jun
27
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. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jun
23
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 ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jun
10
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 ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jun
02
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 ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
May
12
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 ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
May
07
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 ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
May
05
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. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
30
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:
Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different. But common threads run through all three dimensions.
...Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
28
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. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
22
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?
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Privacy | Copyright 2010 Return Path, Inc.