Dec
07
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
As I mentioned in in an earlier post, Return Path is celebrating its 10-year anniversary as a global leader in the email business. Over this period we've seen the email channel, evolve, progress and in some instances regress but despite all the upheaval and regularly scheduled predictions of its demise, email remains the most popular, necessary and cost-effective Internet technology. No matter where in the world you live or work, you rely on email for your personal and professional communications - especially in Australia as evidenced by just released Big Australia Email Report.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
Nov
30
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
A poem from an AOL postmaster called Nightmares Before Christmas says it all (and in rhyme!).
You'd think that retailers who already send 5-10 non-targeted email messages a week (yes, that is sometimes more than one a day) would not have much room to grow in frequency this season.
You'd be wrong.
Our Return Path deliverability and reputation data is...
Categories: Email Deliverability | Response
Nov
23
By Bonnie Malone
Director of Response Consulting
As my colleague Tom Sather discussed in Part 1 of this post, the key component of Hotmail's Windows Live Sender Reputation Panel data is sender recognition, as every "This is junk" and "This is not junk" vote results from the panelist's ability to quickly identify familiar senders. Since panel members are presented a variety of email that is delivered to both the junk folder and the inbox, it's a prime opportunity to influence how your mail is delivered across the Microsoft network. Are your email messages designed to optimize branding and recognition? Although it may seem as though your company's delivery is at the whim of these select panelists, the power is ultimately in your hands. Use these tactics to help evaluate your existing branding strategy, and consider implementing a few changes to help spur brand recognition, subscription recall, and more positive panelist feedback ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Nov
18
By George Bilbrey
President
Fred Tabsharani has a thought-provoking article on Deliverability.com about domain reputation.
I have a few thoughts on the "gold rush" Fred describes, based on my conversations with major ISPs and others in the industry:
1) The industry is making WAY too much out of domain reputation
The manic nature of a "Gold Rush" is exactly what the raft of articles about domain reputation feels like. It feels like a lot of marketers are saying the equivalent of "Now that domain reputation is in place, all my delivery problems will disappear." Sure, domain reputation has some advantages such as reputation portability (as Fred points out). However, there are two things to note ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Nov
17
By Tom Sather
Director, Professional Services
As discussed in my previous post, email providers have long used engagement metrics to determine email reputation and deliverability. These metrics include "This is Spam" (aka TiS) data, "This is Not Spam" (aka TiNS) data, panel data, Trusted Reporter data, and Inactive Account data. In this post, we're going to focus on the largely unknown, yet highly effective use of panel data in Microsoft's anti-spam filtering technologies.
Panelists, or Windows Live Sender Reputation data as Microsoft calls them, are a small group of Windows Live Hotmail users that come from every corner of the world, and classify up to 300,000 messages per day as "junk" or "not junk." These users are selected at random (sorry, invite only!) and can come from any type of email service that Microsoft offers, like Windows Live or MSN. These panelists are actual subscribers on your lists and are asked to evaluate messages that either have landed in the spam folder or in the inbox and determine if it's something they expected to receive or not. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Nov
11
By Melinda Plemel
Senior Receiver Relationship Manager
Congratulations to our partners at COX for launching a new postmaster site.
Lots of ISPs have postmaster pages, so what's the big deal about this one?
It's frequently difficult to get all the information you might need to understand the rules of the road at an ISP. The Cox postmaster pages provide error code definitions, preferred connection configurations, instructions on how to sign up for Cox's feedback loop (which is proudly powered by Return Path) and other useful information to help understand delivery issues. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Oct
22
By Tom Sather
Director, Professional Services
Many senders have noticed changes in the way that ISPs do their filtering, notably at the big four of AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, and have been scratching their heads as to what changed, and what can they do now to get delivered back to the inbox. The answer is in how ISPs are calculating sender's reputation scores (hint: it's really not that new). Less than savory senders are always looking for ways to game the system to bypass current filtering methods. As a result, ISPs and email providers are constantly changing and improving their filtering methods.
The major email providers are already using, or plan to use, a broad set of engagement metrics to determine inbox placement, not just clicks and opens as has been widely reported, to determine the level of user engagement for different senders. These include:
Categories: Email Deliverability
Oct
15
By George Bilbrey
President
IBM acquired Outblaze's messaging assets this past April, and they have just gone live with an email service called Lotuslive iNotes. With this change, they also have a new contact address for the Postmaster team: postmaster@lotuslive.com and abuse@lotuslive.com.
Outblaze remains a separate entity, for the moment, with its own hosted email customers and they will continue to maintain the legacy Outblaze feedback loop (FBL). However, for sites that already have a FBL set up they will be migrating that to Lotuslive in the next week or two. So, if you're receiving a FBL from Outblaze currently you'll soon start to get feedback loop traffic for your IP space from Lotuslive (fblbounce@fbl.mail.lotuslive.com).
Lotuslive will send another announcement when ...
Categories: Email Deliverability
Oct
13
by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
There's still a few weeks before Halloween, but have we ever got a scary story for you -- and every word of it is true. (Imagine we're sitting around a campfire, chowing down on s'mores, flashlights under our faces.)
Seven years ago, on this very internet, there was a man named Matthew who was angry about spam. Now sure, there are lots of people angry about spam, and some of them are named Matthew, but this particular Matthew decided that he was going to do something about it.
Matthew noticed that a lot of spam came from foreign countries, and that he didn't get any real mail from people who lived there. So he created blacklists for each country that sent him spam. Then he noticed that a lot of spam came from particular large ISPs, and he created blacklists for each ISP that sent him spam. Soon Matthew had a lot of lists, and some of them were very big.
Five years passed, and suddenly Matthew and his lists disappeared! ...Tell me more
Categories: Email Deliverability
Our new episode of Reputation Radio is available now on iTunes.
In this episode, we speak with Tom Sather of Return Path about domain reputation. What is domain reputation? What is the difference between domain reputation and IP reputation? Why is domain reputation important for getting your emails delivered to your customers inboxes? Tom answers these questions and more.
Is there someone ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
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