Same Spam, Different Day

Neil Schwartzman
Senior Director, Security Strategy, Receiver Services

McAfee just released their March 2010 spam report.

The good news: as a percentage of email, spam has remained flat.

The very bad news: Overall email volume is way up so the amount of spam has gone way up too. Translation: there is a lot more crap clogging up the system.

For large inbox providers a move toward systems that ...

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Whitelistin' Ain't Easy

by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services

Whitelists exist because spam filters exist. They are the exception policy, the safety valve. But beyond that simple truism, there are a lot of differences.

Because there's so much spam, filters have to rely on patterns derived from similarities between known spam messages. When a message matches the pattern, the filter notices and does something: reject it, put it in a spam folder, et cetera. Messages that don't match the pattern sail on through.

Similarly, if the message's source -- usually tracked by IP address -- matches the pattern, all messages from that source are noticed by the filter. This could be as specific as a single IP address, or could be a range of IP addresses. When a filter's pattern is broad, it catches a lot of spam. But it may also catch some non-spam messages; this is what's called a "false positive." To avoid those, you could (and probably will) improve the filters over time -- but by the time you find out, the damage is already done. In the meantime, you need a whitelist.

Most mail system administrators will whitelist their own network infrastructure; it's under their control (or under the control of someone nearby), so if any problems come up they can fix them. Also, it's generally a bad idea to block mail from your boss.

Next you'll want to whitelist companies and organizations you and your users frequently interact with. Do a quick mental inventory: how many is that? Did you remember your payroll company, your health insurance benefits broker, your local pizza delivery joint? What about the company your local pizza joint outsourced their email to -- how many other companies do does that company send for? Do they all deserve a free pass around your spam filters?

Pretty soon, managing exceptions to your filters becomes more complicated, more time-consuming, than managing the filters in the first place. And then the phone rings: some company you've never heard of, asking to be whitelisted so they can send their newsletter to a VP you've never even met -- but you've heard she thinks it's easy (and fun) to replace technical staff like you. Or maybe you work for an ISP, and the frat boy on the phone insists that hundreds of your users are just begging for this email. You can't call every single user in the middle of the night to ask if that's true. How do you decide?Tell me more

Categories: Email Deliverability

RETURN PATH'S EMAIL DELIVERY IMPERATIVES REPORT ADVISES EMAIL SENDERS ON BEST PRACTICES FOR SENDING EMAIL IN 2010

New York, NY - February 22, 2010 - Return Path, the leading email deliverability and reputation management company, today released its Email Delivery Imperatives guide outlining best practices for email senders in 2010. According to Return Path, email senders should be prepared to:

• Implement email authentication, specifically DKIM


• Apply for email whitelists


• Prepare for increased focus on developing user engagement metrics by ISPs

"Almost 95% of email messages at one point in 2009 were classified as spam, according to a recent study," said George Bilbrey, President, Return Path. "As ISPs battle the onslaught of spam , the risks increase that legitimate senders' will find their emails mislabeled as spam or junk and not reach consumers' inboxes. After talking with ISPs about trends for 2010, we identified three key strategies senders should focus on to help ISPs properly identify their mail and ensure delivery to the inbox."

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Categories: Email Deliverability | Press Releases

Deliverability Benchmarks: A Spotlight on Europe - and the 15% of Email that Doesn't Get Delivered

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting

The recently released Return Path Deliverability Benchmark report revealed that email deliverability problems plague marketers across the globe. European marketers, with an 85% inbox rate (messages delivered to subscribers' inboxes) are slightly better off than their colleagues in North America who only make it to the inbox 80% of the time. Europeans are a bit worse off than their counter-parts in Asia-Pacific who get delivered 86% of the time.

Here are some key findings from major markets in Europe:

+ In the United Kingdom, 89% of email made to the inbox. France did almost as well with an 88% inbox rate while Germany was in line with the European average at 85%.

+ For email being sent to the "spam" or "bulk" folder, the United Kingdom had the lowest rate at just 3% while Germany had the highest with 11%. France was right in the middle with nearly 5% of email sent to the "junk" or "bulk" folder.
+ A significant percentage of email was categorized as "missing" or not delivered at all. In both the United Kingdom and France 7% of email went missing. Germany did slightly better with just 3% in this category.

The report also looked at non-delivered rates (messages routed to junk/bulk folders or blocked all together) by Internet Service Provider (ISP) in France, Germany and the UK. Inbox placement rates varied significantly from ISP to ISP. In the UK, toughest inboxes to get into were Demon, BT Internet, AOL, Orange, and Yahoo!. In France, it was SFR, AOL, LaPoste, Yahoo!, and Orange and in Germany, it was Web.de, AOL, Yahoo!, Freenet, and GMX.

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Categories: Email Deliverability | News | Response

Deliverability Benchmarks are back - and 20% of email is still not making it to the inbox

By George Bilbrey
President

Today, Return Path is pleased to present our Global Deliverability Benchmark for the second half of 2009. We conducted this study by monitoring data from our Mailbox Monitor service for email campaigns deployed from July to December 2009. We tracked delivery, blocking and filtering for more than 600,000 campaigns. In addition we reviewed non-delivered data for hundreds of ISPs in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom and the Asia Pacific territories.

Here are some highlights and key findings:

• Twenty percent of email in the United States and Canada is still not making it to the inbox while 3% of email goes to the "junk" or "bulk" folder and another 16% goes missing


• In Europe, 85% of email arrives as expected with 3.6% ending up in the "junk" or "bulk" folder and 11% not delivered at all


• Asia Pacific does better than Europe and North America with 86.9% of email delivered to the inbox, 3% is "bulked" and another 10% is missing


• Achieving strong inbox placement remains a challenge in the B-to-B sector with a delivered rate of just 75%

What does this data tell us about the state of email marketing? The answer is clear: deliverability is still a crisis for commercial email senders.

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Categories: Email Deliverability | News

Almost 20% of Commercial, Permissioned Emails Never Reached U.S. & Canadian Consumer Inboxes in the Second Half of 2009, According to New Return Path Email Deliverability Benchmark Report

New York, NY - As commercial email senders increasingly turn to email marketing to help drive sales and attract new customers, problems remain in ensuring that requested emails successfully reach consumer inboxes. In the second half of 2009, 19.9% of commercial, permissioned emails never reached consumers inboxes in the United States and Canada, a slight improvement from January - June 2009 when 20.7% of commercial, permmissioned emails failed to reach consumers inboxes, according to the new Return Path Email Deliverability Benchmark Report. European inbox placement rates fared slightly better with 15% of requested, permissioned emails never reaching consumer inboxes.

Permissioned email reached only 80.1% of consumer inboxes in the United States and Canada during the second half of 2009 (July through December), a .8% increase from the 79.3% inbox placement rate recorded in the first half of 2009. In the United States and Canada, 3.5% of those emails were delivered to a "junk" or "bulk" email folder and 16.3% were missing or not delivered at all - with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery. In Europe, 85.5% of emails reached consumers inboxes, 3.6% of emails were delivered to a "junk" or "bulk" folder, and 11% of emails were missing or not delivered at all. In the Asia Pacific region, inbox placement of permissioned emails was higher in the second half of 2009 with 86.9% of emails reaching the inbox. 10.7% of emails were missing or not delivered and 2.5% of emails were delivered to a "junk" or "bulk" folder.

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Categories: Email Deliverability | News | Press Releases

SpamAssasin Rarely Misses

by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services

SpamAssassin is, by any measure, the most popular open source spam filtering software. It has won numerous awards, and has been incorporated into many commercial filtering appliances. On Tuesday, the SpamAssassin developers announced version 3.3.0, their first major update since 2007.

SpamAssassin was born in 2001, when Justin Mason (who is still involved in the project) rewrote & updated an earlier open-source filtering script. At present it primarily consists of a set of message tests of varying complexity, each analyzing portions of the headers or body and adding to or subtracting from the resulting spam score.

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Episode #14 of Reputation Radio is LIVE!

Our new episode of Reputation Radio is now available on iTunes.

In this episode, we interview Peter Blair, Security Specialist at Tucows. Blair discusses the biggest misconceptions among marketers about deliverability and how ISPs handle mail. Blair also talks about Tucows' Feedback Loop for email senders, and he discusses the recent debate about ISPs use of engagement metrics as part of email deliverability.

Is there someone in the email universe you think we should interview? Do you have a question about email deliverability or sender reputation>? Call (320) 52EMAIL (523-6245) and leave a message. Or, email us: podcast@returnpath.net. We might use your question in a future episode.

Listen to episode 14 now and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a minute of Reputation Radio.

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Categories: Email Deliverability | News

A New Year and...Spam Still Growing

By Alex Rubin
Vice President of Business Development

As we gear up for the New Year, it is also a good time to review the highs and lows of the past. By learning what happened in email (cut) and what changed in 2009, we have the opportunity to properly prepare for what is ahead. Last week we released a report on the 10 Top Email Trends of 2009, the complete report is available for download here.

One of the primary things we highlighted about 2009 and expect to see more of in 2010, is the continued growth of spam. Throughout 2009, we saw a flurry of articles publishing metrics on spam volumes rising and the increase of spam as a percentage of all email.

Spammers continue to have access to sophisticated tools to help them send more spam. Let's face it, reports indicate there is a ton of money to be made from being a spammer so they won't to just go away.

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Categories: Email Deliverability

Sender Score Footprint: Bigger is Better

By George Bilbrey
President

As we told you just before the new year, the Return Path team has been hard at work integrating new data sources into the scoring models that power our Sender Score. The updates are live and in all, we've increased the size of the Sender Score footprint by 25%!

More access to unique IP data means Return Path will be able to calculate Sender Scores for even more IPs. I'm proud to report that there will be very few scenarios where we won't be able to generate a score for an IP.

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Categories: Email Deliverability | News