Email Deliverability Posts
Jan
13
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
As I mentioned in some recent posts on OnlyOnce, I've really enjoyed sharing the Return Path story with the tech start-up community in New York through groups like the NYC Lean Startup Meetup.
Next week I'm taking the Return Path story on the road to Silicon Valley where I'll be presenting to Startup2Startup. Startup2Startup is a group of Silicon Valley geeks, entrepreneurs, and investors dedicated to educating and helping the next generation of Internet startups. They meet monthly over dinner to discuss relevant topics in technology and entrepreneurship, connect with new people and companies, and share our knowledge and experience.
You'll not only get hear about Return Path's 10 years in business but I'll also be sharing some best practices to diagnose and resolve email deliverability problems.
Interested? Request an invitation here.
Stay tuned for more on this post-event.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
Jan
12
by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
Hey there, fellow spam fighters. Read this quick, because any second now all those infected machines that were powered down over the holidays will boot up, get fresh orders from their bot masters, and start sending spam again. Most of 'em already have.
We've published a bunch of
Email Still Isn't Dead You've seen the stats: Facebook and Twitter aren't replacing email, they're sending email. This will continue in 2010, and become more complex now that Facebook wants application developers to ask users for their email addresses in order to send them notifications them directly.
Categories: Email Deliverability
Jan
08
By Melinda Plemel
Senior Receiver Relationship Manager
Congratulations to our partners at BlueTie for launching a new postmaster site (http://postmaster.bluetie.com). If you don't recognize the name BlueTie, you are most likely familiar with one of their biggest domains - excite.com. BlueTie is the leading provider of hosted email and calendaring solutions for small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and service providers worldwide.
We have mentioned that many ISPs and mailbox service providers have launched postmaster sites in past posts, but what is special about this one?
Categories: Email Deliverability
Jan
06
By Melinda Plemel
Senior Receiver Relationship Manager
We're pleased to present a special report on the top ten email trends in 2009 based on our experiences working with top marketers and the world's leading ISPs. We hope this look back will help you look forward and make 2010 the best year yet for email.
The Top 10 Emails Trends in 2009 include:
1. Spam growth continues - Estimated daily spam volumes for 2009 were more than 117 billion emails per day. In addition, image spam increased in 2009, a problem for enterprises and ISPs using outdated email security software.
2. False positives increase - 2009 also saw a rise in "false positives". This is when a legitimate, requested, and wanted email is mistakenly blocked outright or delivered to a bulk folder by a spam filter. ISPs increased their use of trusted whitelists in an effort to more accurately identify legitimate email and prevent false positives.
3. Phishing impacts everyone - Criminal enterprises phished even more 2009 - sending forged emails purporting to be from banks, social networks, and brand marketers to gain access to account information. Return Path recommends authenticating your email as a way to combat phishing.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jan
04
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
As we embark on a new year and a new decade (and Return Path's second decade in business), I'm back with my annual predictions for the email industry. My 2009 good news-bad news predictions were somewhat prescient but certainly not my best effort. So, after considerable thought and a fair amount of internal debate, here's what I've got:
1) ISPs will focus more of their anti-spam efforts around picking out the good guys rather than blocking the bad guys. Why? There are just so many more bad guys - and we've reached a tipping point where it is faster and cheaper to cherry pick the good senders. Along with their internal tools, we'll see more ISPs rely on 3rd party white lists like Return Path Certification for more accurate filtering.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
Dec
29
By George Bilbrey
President
As 2010 begins and many head to the gym to fulfill New Year's resolutions, here at Return Path we'll be getting our workout strengthening our data! As the world's most comprehensive email reputation data source (collecting data from over 150 million mailboxes worldwide), we are dedicated to ensuring our reputation scores are accurate, current and thorough.
We know the email universe relies on our Sender Score. For anyone who sends email, it's the foremost measure of email reputation - a direct reflection on sending practices based on universal reputation metrics: user complaints, spam trap hits, unknown user counts, and more. For those receiving mail, Sender Score can be used to inform inbound email handling and assist with the Herculean task of separating good email from spam.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
Dec
21
by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
Think about what you were doing on the Internet fifteen years ago, as 1994 rolled over to 1995. The Mosaic browser was brand new; Netscape 1.0 shipped that December. Windows 95 hadn't been released. Bill Clinton was still considered a hip, young president. And me? I was already dealing with spam.
Some people may try to tell you that spam started in the seventies, but that's just shoddy research. Up until the mid-nineties, there were maybe a handful of misguided marketers sending out spam‚ email or otherwise, each year. It wasn't anything like we've got today, and it wasn't a big deal because they were always slapped down quick. The early Internet had an Acceptable Use Policy which basically forbade all commercial activity, and violating it meant you lost access.
But within just a few years, it all changed. The last vestiges of the non-commercial Internet were replaced by paid access, which led to the expectation that if you paid your bills on time you could do whatever you damn well pleased. Mom & Pop dial-up ISPs were borged into a few corporate conglomerates, yet neither had ever imagined they'd have to deal with any email activity worse than the occasional chain letter.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Dec
17
by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
As announced this morning, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has established formal relationships with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the BITS/Financial Services Roundtable.
MAAWG is comprised of ISPs, technology vendors including Return Path, ESPs, and a small but growing number of big brands, all interested in talking about email spam and other abuses of messaging systems. Some of their published documents include the Senders Best Communications Practices, which could be called the deliverability bible, and Message Sender Reputation Concepts and Common Practices, the best publicly available resource for understanding reputation systems like Sender Score.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
Our new episode of Reputation Radio is available on iTunes.
In this episode, we speak with Ken Magill of the Magilla Marketing newsletter and DIRECT about the current state of the email industry. Ken discusses how email industry insiders love to talk about advanced concepts while many businesses are still challenged by the basics. Why do direct marketing veterans still struggle to grasp the unique characteristics of email marketing? Which companies executing email right and which companies are getting it wrong? Ken answers these questions and more.
Is there someone in the email universe you think we should interview? Do you have a question about email deliverability or sender reputation? Call 206-350-5512 and leave a message. Or, email us: podcast@returnpath.net. We might use your question in a future episode.
Listen to episode 13 now and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a minute of Reputation Radio.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News | Response
Dec
11
As you may know, just in time for Christmas, The Spamhaus Project recently announced their new anti-snow-shoeing service the CSS component of the SBL: http://www.spamhaus.org/css/index.lasso
Spamhaus also has an http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=650>article that offers some good information.
The CSS is the second such list to appear online; Invaluement was the first out of the gate with their ivmSIP/24 zone.
Both the SBL and ivmSIP/24 are part of the batch of checks we run constantly, against Return Path Certified and Safe whitelisted IPs. We also run a number of other tests to flag activity that is frowned upon by the receiving community.
SURBL, the domain blacklist, just announced their new, experimental zone of snowshoe domains, XS.
So, what is snowshoeing and how do you avoid such a pitfall?
Snowshoeing is, in a nutshell, spreading mail over IP ranges, domains or name-servers, in an attempt to lessen the impact of poor reputation upon an individual element.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
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