Email Deliverability Posts
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
Jan
22
By Neil Schwartzman
Sender Score Certified Compliance
You may have heard recently about spammers sending out scads of their usual garbage with topical subject lines referring to the Chinese satellite issue, or the terrible storms taking place in Europe. These messages are actually Trojans intending to infect unwitting recipients. This is a typical social engineering trick to garner better open rates, a variance on subject lines like "About the meeting today" or "Dont understand, hope u can help."
But now, spammers have discovered a new tactic that has serious implications for the sender community. According to Symantec, spammers are now forging email to look like it is coming from the publishers of legitimate newsletters and email streams. Just as phishing has hampered financial services move into email, this type of spam will have serious negative impact on legitimate senders caught up in this deception.
There are a few steps you can take to mitigate any damage ...
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Jan
19
By Neil Schwartzman
Sender Score Certified Compliance
Last week I wrote about how the sender community needs to be engaged and involved in the fight against spam. In particular, anyone who cares about the future of email needs to be very concerned about spammers who use "zombie" computers to send their messages.
Many senders wonder what action steps they can take to help in this fight. Well, today Spamhaus launched a new Policy Block List that is intended to be a compendium of legitimate IP addresses. Want to help the global fight on zombies and botnets? Join the list.
The Spamhaus PBL is pretty simple. ...
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Jan
17
By Dan Deneweth
Director, Product Management
There has been a surge in discussion around email testing recently, and the steps marketers can take to optimize their email creative. While not directly related to email delivery rates, how an email renders in various email readers will have an impact on the overall effectiveness of an email campaign. For this reason, pre-campaign content testing should be part of any formal email marketing program.
Return Path's content testing tool, Campaign Preview, shows you what your email looks like in the most popular email readers in use today by your audience. And, we are getting getting ready to release a major upgrade to our tools to include views with images off for all represented email readers that offer images off by default, as well as preview pane views, both horizontal and vertical. This release will also include rendering views for some of the most popular email readers in the UK and Europe. ...
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Jan
11
By Neil Schwartzman
Sender Score Certified Compliance
In my role as chair of the Canadian Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, I recently gave a presentation to law enforcement and policy makers in the European Union. The intention was to alert them to the seriousness of zombie botnets threatening the infrastructure of the internet.
Thinking back on what I said to that group, I realize now that the only way we are going to take back the internet is to do what the bad guys did a long time ago: Break down the walls between the good guys and get us all rowing in the same direction.
Spam has evolved from amateurish to professional in the last several years. There is disturbing evidence that organizationally the walls between the virus-makers, hackers, spyware creators and botnet herders have broken down. These previously disparate groups are now working in concert in a way that is leading to increasingly sophisticated, online criminal activity. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jan
09
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
Global companies know that email deliverability is becoming just as big of a problem overseas as it is in the United States. Dealing with those problems becomes even more complex when you consider the number of time zones, language barriers, and the recent number of acquisitions in the European ISP market. Return Path has been helping clients internationally for a long time, and has now formalized its program to expand that help to its ESP partners.
With the Sender Score Receiver Alliance, ESPs benefit from ...
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Jan
02
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Gmail has a bug that exposes your Gmail account address book if: (1) you have Gmail open; (2) you (like me) run Firefox and (3) you visit a malicious website site that runs a script calling for the address book. I haven't been able to confirm whether this has been fixed. You can read a better description of the problem here.
I'd be willing to bet that the "blackhats" found this hole a while ago and have harvested quite a few addresses. There is a ready market for ....
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Dec
28
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
Earlier this quarter I wrote about the first step in finding an email service provider: getting your own program in order.
Meanwhile, another question that I get from a lot of email marketers is: which ESP is the best at deliverability?
Well, here's the good news: when it comes to infrastructure and the basic technological and authentication set ups that ISPs are looking for, all the major vendors in the United States do just fine. Additionally many top-tier vendors have ISP relations or other deliverability professionals who can help fix minor problems as they arise. The smaller players tend to manage this through their technology departments and others offer that service through outsourcing (in some cases to Return Path). ...
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