Return Path's Partnership with Cloudmark Puts Email Subscribers First

We're proud to announce that Cloudmark is using Return Path's Sender Score Certified whitelist as a means of determining inbox placement for commercial email. Cloudmark provides spam filtering solutions for North American ISP customers including Earthlink, Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter, Telus and Cincinnati Bell and a global base of service provider customers including THUS, Tele2, Clara.net, Fastweb, NTT OCN and NEC BIGLOBE. They have joined the ranks of Windows Live Hotmail, GoDaddy and soon Yahoo! and many major corporations and educational institutions making the most comprehensive and widely used whitelist 1.2 billion inboxes strong.

We are very excited about what this means for marketers who understand the importance of maintaining high reputation standards to earn a valid spot in the inbox rather than paying for placement. But we are also excited about what this means for ISPs.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Sender Score Certified Now Covers 1.2 Billion Inboxes

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

Sender Score Certified is growing by leaps and bounds with the recent adoption of the Sender Score Certified whitelist by Cloudmark. This partnership makes Sender Score Certified the industry's largest, most comprehensive and widely used whitelist giving approved senders preferential treatment into over 1.2 billion email inboxes. Moreover, this gives Return Path's Sender Score Certified the largest footprint of any email certification program available today with coverage in more than 80% of the mailboxes operated by the top 20 ISPs worldwide.

This means that more receivers will use the high reputation scores of Sender Score Certified members as a positive determinant for inbox placement. Receivers that accept the Sender Score Certified whitelist include, among others, Windows Live Hotmail, Time Warner Cable, GoDaddy and soon Yahoo! and Yahoo! operated email properties.

Categories: Email Deliverability

AOL Changes Authentication and Whitelist Standards

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

We've recently learned some news from AOL about changes to how they authenticate inbound mail as well as changes to their whitelist program. We'll know more after a question and answer session with AOL this afternoon (hosted by the ESPC) but here's what we know now.

Categories: Email Deliverability

A Belated 2007 Year in Review with a Look Ahead to 2008

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

We waited a little while to make sure that 2007 was really and truly over before noting the interesting trends for the year. With a fair degree of certainty we can predict that 2007 won't return. After polling some of the smarter folks about deliverability at Return Path, here are some of the trends that we found interesting over the last year and what we think will happen in '08.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Spammer indictment is good news for the email industry

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

I've always maintained that spam does not make one great, but Al Ralsky kept a relatively high profile for long enough that his unwelcome intrusions into our inboxes - and our friends' inboxes, and our parents' inboxes, and our children's inboxes - will be long remembered.

Today the entire email industry is cheering the arrest and indictment of Ralsky and his gang, which was reported in the Detroit Free Press this morning. It's obviously good news for anti-spammers, who have been clamoring for prosecutions of illegal spamming activity for more than a decade. But it's also wonderful news for the email marketing industry, which has been trying to show the world that they aren't spammers. Now, the marketers can point to Ralsky's illegal activities and state with one voice: "we do not do these awful things."

Categories: Email Deliverability

Changing your IP Address to Combat Holiday Traffic?

By Tom Sather
Email Deliverability Consultant

The holiday season is here and the gloves are off. Competition for inbox placement and subscriber activity will be stiff as marketers vying for consumer dollars will increase both the volume and frequency of their special offers. To cope with the increase of email traffic, many marketers have decided to add new IP addresses to handle the load. But marketer beware! Some of the top ISPs are putting new IP addresses with no sending history on a short leash until they can gather enough reputational data to determine how to deliver the email. In order to establish a reputation on a new IP address, you will have to do the following:

Categories: Email Deliverability

Sender Score Receiver Alliance Welcomes Four New Members

By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development

Return Path's has always been a pioneer in deliverability performance. As the industry's first email deliverability monitoring service, Return Path has remained at the forefront of email innovation since its launch in 1999.

Today, Return Path lends that same knowledge and expertise to the European market. With over 150 local ISPs who speak different languages, ESPs face challenges that are difficult to tackle independently without multi-lingual support and international relationships. What we found was that global marketers needed a deliverability "go-between" to help them efficiently manage overseas marketing campaigns with the same gusto and expertise available in the U.S. In response, Return Path launched the Sender Score Receiver Alliance with three charter members, e-Dialog, eCircle, and 1000mercis. Today, we are proud to announce the addition of our four newest members - Splio Développement, The Communicator Corp, IPT and Responsys.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Don't Expect Your ESP to Have the Magic Wand for Solving Your Deliverability Issues

By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development

After attending the recent MAAWG conference, I traveled to Europe where I spent much of my time with a variety of email service providers (ESPs) discussing the current market conditions and where they saw opportunities moving forward. On my flight home, I realized that there was one resonating theme around my conversations. Almost all of the ESPs I spoke with had significant concerns around supporting the portion of their client base that cause the most deliverability issues. It made me realize that the email deployment industry is setting their pricing policies all wrong.

For years, people have commented on (some might say complained about) the industry use of a CPM pricing model even though the ESP costs are roughly the same whether your campaigns are sent to 1,000 or 100,000 people. Whether or not you agree with this model on principle, it's clear to me that this is causing a problem now that many ESPs bundling their deliverability services as part of this CPM. Here is what's wrong with this picture...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Get a Grip on your Handheld

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

On your daily commute, during your lunch hour or even between meetings, what is it that you see people doing other than reading the paper or drinking a hot cup of coffee? Checking email - and not on their laptops, but rather on their handheld mobile devices. In fact, the adoption of Blackberrys spawned the term "crackberry" to describe this rapidly spreading addiction that has essentially sparked a cultural change in how people communicate.

As a result, this "always on" medium has become a very attractive channel for savvy marketers. However, it poses the same rendering challenges we face in traditional email with the added complexity of operational and device differentiators that are beyond a marketer's control. Given that, how can you design your email campaigns effectively for mobile? Use Sender Score Campaign Preview.

Today, I am very pleased to announce that your mobile worries are over! Return Path has launched the first ever email rendering solution for mobile devices. Our Sender Score Campaign Preview tool will now allow marketers to see exactly what their email campaigns will look like on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and Blackberry devices.

Categories: Email Deliverability

How to Impress the ISPs

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

I've been working on email for more than a decade, and I've met a lot of people from all sides of the industry. When working on Yahoo! Mail and before that on Microsoft's MSN Hotmail, I was very popular at industry conferences. People would interrupt each other to introduce themselves, seek out my opinion, hand me their business cards, and so forth. It was really quite disconcerting.

I can understand why they thought it was necessary. In business, in politics, in almost every aspect of most peoples' lives, building relationships is inherent to accomplishing pretty much anything. But when it comes to deliverability, fawning over ISP staff will not get your mail where you want it to go. That's simply not how email operates.

In my experience, many marketers and other large-volume email senders confuse the tactics that will make the ISP staff like you with the tactics that will actually get your email to the inbox. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability