Email Deliverability Posts
Jul
25
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Ninety-seven percent of the email senders out there have terrible reputations. They aren't just suspect, they aren't just a little bit bad ... they are in the bottom of the barrel -- scoring less than 30 according to our Sender Score Reputation Monitor. Sender Scores less than 30 are highly likely to get blocked by email receivers. Scores higher than 70 are most likely to get delivered -- yet not even 1% of mailers make that cut.
So what does this mean for the average commercial emailer? Reputation is the key to inbox delivery. You need to know what your Sender Score is - think of it like your credit score for email. Then you need to ....
Categories: Email Deliverability
Jun
28
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Several times a year the anti-spam community gets together for the general meetings of the Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). It may be an outrageously bad acronym but it's a great meeting to hear what the largest ISPs and other spam-fighters are thinking about spam and how to fight it. This summer the meeting is in Brussels. A few themes and factoids that might be interesting to marketers were clear during the conversations and presentations. These include:
-- Many of the ISPs that have yet to use reputation based filtering are heading in that direction.
-- There has been much less conversation about the mechanics of different authentication techniques than in past conferences. However, it doesn't seem that ...
Categories: Email Deliverability
By Stephanie Miller
VP Strategic Services
It's the email marketing equivalent of looking in the mirror after you've been dancing all night. You feel great, you were light on your feet, but WHAM, you suddenly see your beautiful HTML email crammed into the Hotmail, Yahoo! or AOL interface with blinking ads all around it and suddenly you've got a hangover. How in the world can we break through all that interface clutter?
The web-based email clients are certainly getting much more aggressive about navigation, promotions and banner ads surrounding the message. AOL recently started placing ads even for paying subscribers. Might be great for advertisers (although I'm not convinced based on my work at Hotmail in the early, pre-Microsoft days), and it might even be okay for subscribers. But it's lousy for email marketers -- it's more competition (sometimes literally competitors, as with Gmail) for your message.
How will the ad influx affect your email program? Every case is different, so you'll need to ...
Categories: Email Deliverability
May
17
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Having spam traps on your email list causes a world of problems: listings on commonly used blacklists and blocks at top ISPs. For the uninitiated, a spam trap is usually an address that was created new and never signed up to receive any mailings. Therefore, by definition, all mail going to that account is unsolicited. This is a great tool to catch spammers who will often mail to addresses that they have harvested from web sites and newsgroups where the good folks who run the spam trap network have published their spam trap email addresses.
So how do legitimate marketers get spam traps on their lists? In our experience, there are three primary ways: (1) Bad luck - when entering an email address in a signup form, the user makes a typo and suddenly you're a proud owner of a spam trap address; (2) Bad partners - one of your data partners (co-registration, etc.) sent you some spam traps ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
18
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Ah, spring. New life is everywhere. Winter clothes are being put away, birds are returning from their winters in the south, flowers are blooming. We at Return Path are doing our part by announcing the "rebirth" of our Bonded Sender Program, the Internet's largest and oldest email accreditation program, or whitelist, as Sender Score Certified.
Since we acquired Bonded Sender last fall, we've had the opportunity to go on a "listening tour" - talking to marketers, publishers, ESPs, ISPs, spam filtering companies, system administrators, email appliance manufacturers - you name it. What we learned was that the program was ground-breaking when it was launched in 2002 but that it needed a makeover in order to meet the challenges that have evolved around spam and deliverability for both senders and receivers during the past few years.
Our listening tour revealed that the Bonded Sender of old had four core issues that weren't sitting well with the Internet community at large:
1. Data validity: some senders questioned the accuracy of some of the application and compliance metrics used;
2. Black box: a complete lack of transparency led many senders to be unclear as to what was driving them to fail applications or have bonds debited;
3. Bond: there isn't a purchasing department in America that knows how to post a bond or understands why they should; and
4. Complaints: as far as ISPs were concerned, even though mailers had to pass some serious hurdles to join the program, mailers who were in the program still managed to generate too many complaints among their end users.
A spring cleaning was in order, and we had the experts to get the job done ....
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
12
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Delivery has long been about reputation. If you have a good one, your email gets delivered. If not, the inbox can be an extremely hard destination to reach. Trouble is, figuring out your email reputation has been hard to do - until now.
Return Path's new service, Sender Score Reputation Monitor, removes some of the delivery mystery by showing you exactly what email receivers think of you - and what they are likely to do with your email. Data contributed by ISPs, filtering companies and other email receivers is compiled to create a "reputation score" for millions of sending IP addresses. That score is like a credit score for email, determining your delivery success.
Before now the best sources of reputation data available were ISP feedback loops, but they tend to look at one or two factors of reputation, missing the full breadth of data types used by receivers to determine deliverability ....
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
05
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
As has been covered in many places, including Direct and The Wall Street Journal, Verizon settled a lawsuit yesterday over "too aggressive" spam filtering, or what we in the business call false positives -- filtering out legitimate, non-spam emails as spam. This is a huge problem that part of our business at Return Path, our Delivery Assurance Solutions group, has been fighting for years.
The gist of the settlement is that Verizon is changing the way it filters spam to make sure more legitimate mail gets through, and that it is refunding various small amounts of money or free months of service to customers who complained about the problem.
I am NOT a believer in lawsuits like this at all ....
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
If you're looking for a fast reminder of what matters when it comes to your email reputation and delivery rates, read my series in iMedia this month. It covers the basics on reputation, complaints, blacklists are more, and also provides resources to aid your internal deliverability efforts.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Mar
27
By Dan Deneweth
Director of Product Management, Delivery Assurance Solutions
Today's Email Insider column focused on the latest cool email "toys" that marketers will crave this summer, sort of like a pre-holiday wish list for kids. Return Path provides two of the three so-called toys-- creative rendering tools and reputation scoring systems. While these products are whizzy like toys, and perhaps even fun to use, they are also extremely useful in boosting your email program's bottom line.
Campaign Preview, our pre-campaign monitoring tool, not only shows you what your email will look like across readers, it shows you what links have issues and whether your email is likely to end up in the junk folder. Fixing those issues before hitting send will increase ...
Categories: Email Deliverability
Mar
15
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Over the last few months, several ISPs have announced or started testing feedback loops in the new Abuse Reporting Format (ARF). For the uninitiated, a feedback loop is a system by which the ISP provides the sender a copy of a message that a subscriber has reported as spam - usually by hitting a "report spam" button. The ISPs that have announced or are testing feedback loops are as follows:
AOL: Currently have feedback loop. Testing ARF format
Earthlink: Currently beta testing feedback loop in ARF format
Excite: Provides periodic list of email addresses of complainters
Hotmail: Beta testing ARF feedback loop
Outblaze: Currently beta testing feedback loop in ARF format
Yahoo: Announced intentions to provide feedback loop this year in ARF
The ARF format is a kind of machine parseable email message that has standard data elements in standard fields. The standardization is great because you can use the same code to pull the information out of these complaint messages.
Why are we so excited about this? Simply put, this information is deliverability gold ....
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
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