Is opt-in permission really enough?

By Neil Schwartzman
Manager, Compliance and ISP Relations

My colleague Stephanie Miller recently posted asking the question "Is permission enough?" A good question! But it begs the question: When it comes to email, what is permission?

For some time now I have contended that confirmed cpt-in, also known as COI, is dead, or at the very least on life support. It certainly is not a major factor in the continued relation between sender and receiver; that relies far more heavily on the ongoing and historical reputation of the mailer and the mail stream. Proof of permission doesn't scale, and is hard to retain.

But then, in my capacity as Executive Director of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), I recently had two eye-opening experiences as to exactly why confirmed (or, if you prefer, double) opt-in is critical to the whole email equation. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Is Permission Still Relevant?

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

My colleague Stephanie Miller wrote a great post last week titled Is Permission Enough? The essence of her argument is:

...permission is not forever...Subscribers opt in and then promptly forget about their actions...Nor is permission a panacea. Opt-in doesn't replace relevancy and keeping your promises.

And she goes on to give great examples of how marketers abuse permission and a great checklist of times marketers shouldn't assume permission, which is where the trouble starts.

So I concur -- permission is never enough from a sender's perspective. But you still have to have it. Why? Read on. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

MAAWG Best Practices: Where to Focus Your Attention

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

My colleague Neil Swartzman wrote a great post announcing the new MAAWG Sender Communication Best Practices which Return Path wholeheartedly endorses.

As Neil recommends, you and your team should definitely take the time to review the whole document and discuss how you can implement the practices. But we also understand that it can be hard to find the time, so we wanted to give you a quick and dirty rundown of the top six areas to focus on ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

DomainKeys Identified Email Becomes Standard

By Robert Barclay
Senior Product Manager

The Internet Engineering Task Force has approved DomainKeys Identified Email (commonly known as DKIM) as a technical standard for email. This clears the way for emailers to implement DKIM and for ISPs to potentially use it to either block or allow email through its system.

We actually think this is great news. It means that DKIM will eventually become the replacement to DomainKeys (DK) as the primary cryptographic-based authentication standard. DKIM has some great advantages over DK, but for my money the biggest one is "third party signing," meaning it allows a domain other than the "From:" domain to sign the messages. There are many cases where the person sending the mail doesn't control the "From:" domain. Third party signing solves that problem, and as a result makes it much more likely that large companies can sign all their mail, even when outsourced to an ESP.

So what's a mailer to do? ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Why You Need to Pay Attention to Reputation

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

Last week Lyris released a deliverability study that finds that content does not cause email to be filtered. This finding echoes a study we did in October that reported that content matters only about 17% of the time.

Lyris came to their conclusion by sending messages through their content checking system and noting that the SpamAssassin "spaminess" scores were very low - much lower than should be a cause of filtering. And yet, the messages weren't necessarily making it to the inbox. Any marketer who has used a spam checker system and gotten the "all clear" only to see their email land in the junk folder (or worse) will understand this phenomenon.

Our study we took a different approach. We took messages that had failed to reach the inbox and re-sent them off a "clean" IP address. Most times, the email reached the inbox, indicating that it was the reputation of the IP and not the message itself, which resulted in filtering.

In both studies, the message is the same ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

AOL's Official Statement on Image Rendering

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

Yesterday we announced that we had been getting reports of mixed results in terms of testing the rendering functionality of the newly released AOL web client. Our tests uniformly indicated that accounts that had existed prior to the code rollout on May 23rd did not have images turned off by default, while new accounts do have the images turned off (which had not been the case prior to the 23rd). We took this to mean that the images off setting would only affect new accounts. However, several people reported to us that their testing uniformly showed images off by default in the AOL web client for pre-existing accounts or showed a mixture of images off and on for pre-existing accounts.

Obviously we found this confusing, so we asked AOL about it.

AOL's official response is ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Update: AOL Image Rendering

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

We've gotten word from some people that ran the same tests that we did yesterday that our posting on the AOL.com image rendering was wrong. These tests showed pre-existing AOL or AIM accounts that had not had their display settings changed and they see that the images are now turned off by default - a change from the initial setting. This is different from the results of our testing on our seed accounts that had also not been changed in any way. In our tests these existing accounts still showed images defaulting to the on setting.

This may be due to the way that AOL is rolling out the change, with not all accounts being updated simultaneously. We've been in contact with AOL on this and will get official word to you later today. Stay tuned...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Another View on Email Authentication

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

In an Email Insider column last week, Chad White wrote about the adoption of authentication processes and gave what we believe is a false impression that authentication is a sort-of annoying task that belongs down in the IT basement.

We believe authentication is something that should be front and center on the mind of every marketing executive. While they don't need to know every technical detail, they should understand what it is and be able to ask intelligent questions of the IT folks so they can make sure the standards are being implemented.

In reporting that 43% of legitimate email volume is certified by Sender ID (a stat from Microsoft) and 48% of retailers have implemented DomainKeys, Chad sees the glass as half-full - most people authenticate, so let's just get past this already.

We hate to be the pessimists here, but this glass looks a little more than half empty to us ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

The Real Story Behind Changes to AOL Image Rendering

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

The eec sent around an email yesterday with some alarming news about the new release of AOL.com and AIM email. According to their report, subscribers using either of these email environments will have their images turned off by default and open rates will suddenly plummet.

Our testing indicates that this is inaccurate. In fact, the new release does suppress images by default, but only for new subscribers to these services. Existing AOL.com and AIM email users will maintain the same image settings they have today. It is certainly true that this change will impact open rates as an open can not be counted on an email with images suppressed. But this change will not be sudden and for some mailers may not be noticeable at all. This is because someone will have to have signed up with one of these accounts yesterday, then sign up with your program now. How much of an impact this will have on your program is completely dependent on three factors ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

The Industry Sets a New Standard

By Neil Schwartzman
Manager, Compliance and ISP Relations

In a vast sea of associations, The Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group is an interesting organization. Its focus is on preventing abuse of all sorts of messaging platforms, especially email. And it's also unique in that it takes a three-pronged approach to the problem: collaboration between receivers and senders, technology solutions and public policy. For all these reasons and more Return Path is proud to be an active MAAWG member.

In the spirit of receiver and sender collaboration, they yesterday announced the release of the "MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices." (There is also an executive summary of the document that helps to explain some of the more technical aspects in terms that marketers and executives are likely to understand.)
This document focuses on five core areas that are important for both marketers and operations professionals ...

Categories: Email Deliverability