Join us for IN: The Email Reputation Conference

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

By now every marketer understands that email that doesn't make it to the inbox doesn't generate response. And most marketers also understand that the key to getting to the inbox is having a stellar sender reputation.

If it's that simple why does so much opt-in, commercial email still not get into the inboxes of the customers who requested it?

Because while sender reputation is a simple concept ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Why it doesn't matter that the Virginia anti-spam law was struck down

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

If the headlines are to be believed, spam is now entirely legal in Virginia and anyone can send whatever they want without any fear of reprisal, ever. Looking beyond the headlines, it appears that the Virginia Supreme Court's ruling in AOL's case against formerly convicted spammer Jeremy Jaynes declares that the Virginia anti-spam law violates the Constitutional protection of anonymous speech, and thus is null and void.

So, are legitimate companies now permitted to send spam? Do the criminals get to run loose in the streets, advertising their wares openly? Are we about to suffer an increase in spam that makes 2007 look like 1977?

Of course not. ...Tell me more

Categories: Email Deliverability

Asia Diary Day 2: Meeting Receivers in Beijing

By Alex Rubin
Vice President, Business Development

Last week I wrote about a deliverability seminar in Singapore with some of APAC's top senders. During our Asia tour we also had a roundtable session with many of the top ISPS in China and Yahoo & Microsoft. The spirit of the session was a chance to improve communication and collaboration in the ISP community.

This is a brief summary of some of the comments expressed by these members of the Chinese ISP community:

• They have general problems with communication outside the region. Most of their interest is finding contacts and opening channels of communication to resolve network block issues. They want to know internal blacklist criteria and urge transparency. ...Tell me more

  Categories: Email Deliverability

Asia Diary Day 1: Meeting Senders in Singapore

By Alex Rubin
Vice President, Business Development

Return Path recently co-hosted a deliverability seminar series in Asia titled "The Truth about Email Deliverability - How Reputation Impacts Email Deliverability." I thought it might be interesting to share some of our experiences interacting with email senders in this large and growing region that is still learning how to interact with the rest of the internet community.

My big takeaway is that the APAC marketing community isn't yet focused on deliverability and reputation so they are lagging the rest of the world in addressing these issues. Deliverability is still a relatively new concept for these senders. They are just beginning to understand that their subscribers are probably not receiving 20% of their emails.

But expect that to change - and quickly - as internet usage is exploding in the region.

Here are some real quotes from legitimate senders (e.g., large banks, airlines and newspaper publishers) from the audience ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Cooler Idea: A Reader Offers Thoughts on Whitelisting

We love it when a cool idea fuels inspiration for more cool ideas.

One of our readers, Paul Broni of Inbox Interactive, wrote this in response to last week's cool idea from Travelocity:

Why not take it one step further?

You know from the domain which set of instructions the recipient needs. ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

It's Not Just You: Where All Those 'cnn.com' Emails Come From

By Neil Schwartzman
Director of Standards and Security, Sender Score Certified Compliance

By now, you have doubtless seen the CNN "news alert" spam using legitimate news story headlines infesting the inboxes of tens of millions of people. There are variations also claiming to be from MSNBC from the same bot network, Storm, and the BBC, on a botnet called Mega-D. No doubt they will morph again to use other social engineered subject lines to trick unwitting people into clicking the links contained within. It is a virus, and more proof that spam 2.0 -- the merging of spammers with virus-makers and spyware writers -- exists. They are unfortunately very good at what they do.

Our friends at MX Logic track this stuff really well, and one of the botnets spewing out this junk was going full throttle at 11 million pieces of spam per hour.

These are all attempts to grow the zombie networks by sending out emails that will infect the computer of anyone who clicks the payload link.

Our inbound spam filtering at Return Path has been ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Opportunity Knocks

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

When our friends at Habeas announced that they were exploring a sale of the company a few months back, we were intrigued. While fiercely competing in the marketplace does create some degree of tension or even mistrust between two companies, that activity also creates a lot of common ground for discussion about the market and the future.

So we are very excited today to announce that we are acquiring Habeas in a deal that is signed and should close within a couple weeks. Cutting through all the PR platitudes, here's what this deal really means for our stakeholders:

For everyone we work with, this deal means we have even more scale. More scale is a good thing. It means we can invest more in our future in everything from technical infrastructure, to product innovation, to globalization, to employee development. It's easy to be great when you're a 25 person company. It's actually quite challenging when you're a 50-100 person company. It becomes easier again, though in different ways, when you are a 200 person company with more resources.

For ISPs and filters, more scale means more and better data products to help fine tune filtering algorithms and improve member experience. It also means an even more streamlined way to reach masses of marketers and publishers.

For sender clients, we can now offer ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability | News

A View of The Email Universe: Return Path's Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

When we set out to build a reputation data network we had a strong sense that the volume of email being sent to top receivers was staggering. But sensing is one thing. Having empirical data is another.

Which is why I'm so excited about the Return Path Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. Now we have actual email performance data that tells us what the email traffic really looks like.

You can read the report yourself here.

Here's my high level take on what we found:

1. Most of the servers sending email shouldn't be. Only 20% of the IPs we studied were ...Tell me more

   Categories: Email Deliverability

Case Study: Web 2.0 Runs on Email

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

It's fashionable in many circles to toll the death knell for email. Part of the reason for that is the rise of Web 2.0 - blogging, social networking, and other methods of interaction that supposedly make email obsolete.
The funny thing is, Web 2.0 tends to rely pretty heavily on email. All those LinkedIn and Facebook emails are the things that drive huge amounts of activity on the sites.

Take Twitter as another example. While Twitter has successfully created a whole new communication method (complete with the verb "to Twitter" and the noun "tweet") a large number of their new members come through email. Specifically they come from peer-initiated email, aka forward to a friend email. Unfortunately for them, a lot of that email was being blocked or junked. This is a common problem for any company that has email forwarding on their site.

Fortunately for Twitter ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

AOL Feedback Loop Gets a Makeover

By J.D. Falk, Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
and Michelle Pelletier, Senior Director, Client Services

Four years ago, a small group of email technology experts - from AOL, Yahoo!, the open source community, and other places - got together to solve what seemed to be a simple problem: feedback loops, such as AOL's, were not standardized and often difficult to parse. The result was a draft standard called the Abuse Reporting Format, or ARF, which has been adopted by nearly every ISP that has created a feedback loop since then - including Comcast and other feedback loops hosted by Return Path. (It's called a "draft standard" because the document has not yet gone through the IETF's full standards process. Few changes are expected as that process continues.)

Once this specification was stable, AOL began to offer an ARF option for those feedback recipients who were ready for it. Being generally nice folks, however, they continued to offer the old format.
But now, AOL has announced on their postmaster blog that they will be offering Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) as the only format for Feedback Loop (FBL) reports. Beginning on September 2, 2008, AOL will remove all non-ARF FBLs. They will also convert all existing non-ARF FBLs to ARF. ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability