Apr
25
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
How Receivers Think About Your Email
By George Bilbrey
I just got back from the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance Summit. It was really exciting to spend so much time discussing reputation and authentication with some of the smartest folks in the industry. If we are going to solve the spam problem and make inboxes safe for consumers and available to marketers, these are folks who are going to do it.
It was particularly exciting to see the interaction between the receiver representatives and large-scale marketers. One of our top clients actually said to my colleague Carmi Jones, "Now I get it!" - meaning, he now understands the interplay of reputation and authentication and how both contribute to inbox placement.
So, in the interest of helping you all "get it," here's some highlights of what's on the minds of top receivers ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
19
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
Take your mind back to 2002. You were perhaps just becoming aware that sometimes the email you sent didn't make it where it was intended to go. Maybe you noticed your carefully crafted promotion went into the "junk" folder on your personal email account. Or you noticed a sudden dip in your metrics that wasn't attributable to the usual factors. You maybe started hearing about blacklists and thought, "Hmmm, is my email being blocked by ISPs? Are my customers not seeing what I send?" And figuring it out was far from clear.
Then along came Return Path with the radical idea that there should be a way for marketers to know what was actually happening to the email they sent to customers and prospects. They created what would become Sender Score Mailbox Monitor and the rest, as they say, is history. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
12
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
The ESPC recently released the results of a really great survey of email users and (among other things) how they use the "report spam" button that is available in many email user interfaces. The summary of the survey can be found here. The survey found 20 percent of respondents admit to using the "report spam" button to unsubscribe. I'm hearing a lot of different reaction to the 20% number ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Mar
26
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Janine Popick at Vertical Response has a great post on her blog about big-time retailers who use image-only email. The screen shots she provides are really stunning. The point I'd like to make is even if these emails had made it to the inbox, the response rates are likely to be low - consumers are too busy and process their email too quickly. If they don't see something compelling right away they delete and move on - and there is no way an email that is essentially blank can be compelling.
This is why it is so important to do pre-campaign checks ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Mar
13
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Over the past week, we have received questions from our clients who have heard about the Spamhaus amicus brief that we signed in the e360 case. We filed the brief after giving it serious consideration. In the end, there were three primary reasons for filing the brief:
Categories: Email Deliverability
Mar
08
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Complaint rates drive an email sender's reputation and the amount of email that make it into the inbox. While many other factors go into building email reputations, complaints have the most immediate impact - and provide the most actionable "reputation repair" guidance.
There are two primary ways to access complaints - through a robust reputation service like Sender Score Reputation Monitor and/or with the use of feedback loops to see who is complaining about you and what triggers those complaints. Using feedback loop (defined) data, senders can tell a lot about their programs. Is a particular data source leading to high complaints? Did a new campaign offend subscribers? By acting on the insights gleaned, we've seen clients reduce complaints rates by more than 50 percent.
Seeing this impact, we know feedback loops are critical for email marketers and this week announced our role in bringing more feedback loops to market. Return Path is now working with the receiver community to provide feedback loops for senders. This week, we launched the first one for USA.NET, the premier provider of hosted email and messaging services. Senders can apply at http://fbl.usa.net/. ....
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Feb
07
By Neil Schwartzman
Sender Score Certified Compliance
Recently, I wrote about the Spamhaus Policy Block List (PBL), suggesting senders encourage their network/connectivity service providers list their illegitimate email-sending IPs as a step towards improving the overall email stream on the internet.
The initial PBL was seeded with listings from the Dynablock NJABL ("Not Just Another Bogus List"), which at the time of the cut-over was at more than 1.9 million entries. (Dynablock is now considered to be moribund and will be taken down in due course.)
The organic uptake at Spamhaus has been phenomenal ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Feb
02
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
This week we announced a partnership with Bizanga, the global provider of a top-notch email processing platform, to increase the efficiency of sender verification for its service provider partners. Now, they will allow their customers to use the Sender Score Certified whitelist in addition to Sender Score Reputation Monitor data to vet incoming senders for the thousands of domains their technology covers.
This is great news for ISPs and other receivers using Bizanga, as their filtering options have just gotten stronger. The combination of Sender Score Certified and our reputation data allows receivers to vet all incoming email -- and block up to 60% -- just based on sender reputation. This allows them to decrease the amount of erroneously filtered email, as well. ...
Categories: Email Deliverability
By Neil Schwartzman
Sender Score Certified Compliance
I was at Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) conference this week and, as always, it was very interesting. Most enlightening was a conversation that George Bilbrey and I had with the head anti-spammer at a large receiving site. His sighed at one point and said, "Senders need to quit whining. We are busy fighting spam here!" While I thought it might not be a particularly politically correct or even polite thing to say, perhaps it is a message that needs to be relayed to senders.
The botnet situation is at a crisis point. If the receiving sites don't put all their resources into shoring up the defenses, there may well not be receiving sites to deliver to. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jan
24
By Matt J. McLaughlin
Software Engineer
As you may have read, Microsoft is soon launching a new version of Office which includes a new Outlook. This new version, called Outlook 2007, includes changes that are going to affect everyone sending email today.
The reason for this is that Microsoft has switched the Outlook rendering engine from Internet Explorer to Word. A rendering engine reads the HTML, rich text or plain text code and displays it in your email message, just like a browser displays a website.
What this means is that instead of displaying your HTML emails with a rendering engine that was designed to render web pages, Outlook will be using a scaled down version that has been included in Word for some time now. While Internet Explorer has seen a recent update to its rendering engine, Microsoft Word has not received the same treatment. This does not mean Outlook will not be able to display your HTML emails but it does mean you will have to change how you approach your email design and layout - in some cases radically.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Privacy | Copyright 2010 Return Path, Inc.