Episode #12 of Reputation Radio is LIVE!

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

The Spam Folder is Your Chance to Shine

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

When a spam filtering system is suspicious of a message, it generally does one of three things:

1. Reject it at the gateway (usually due to an IP reputation system or blacklist, which nearly all ISPs use, rather than a filter-only system more common in enterprise environments.)
2. Accept it, but then run it through the filters and delete the message if it triggers some specific threshold for suspicious content or a poor reputation score.
3. Let it into the system, run it through the filters, then -- if suspicious -- save it to a folder named spam, junk, or something similar.

While each ISP or anti-spam filter vendor has their own philosophy of where to set those thresholds, the general philosophy is always the same. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Deliverability Emergencies from the ISP Side of the Desk

Neil Schwartzman
Director, Certification Security & Standards

I recently read an interesting blog post over at Word to the Wise, about Delivery Emergencies .

Laura Atkins makes the point that many email emergencies are a result of poor planning, or an error on the part of the sender.

I've written about this before, check out my post: "Is Your Email an Invited Guest or a Drunken Frat-boy?"

Fortunately, most people grow out of their college fraternity phase, and the same applies to most email senders. As folks become aware of industry standards and best common practices, they adapt their mailing paradigms to what is expected of them by receivers, and recipients. Those that don't, suffer the consequences. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Retailers: Certification is a Holiday Response Booster

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

Retailers enjoy some of the lowest complaint rates in the business. Perhaps this is because of the "shopper mentality" among consumers. Many like to be treated like VIPS or insiders when it comes to sales and new product lines, and so even the high frequency (up to 10+ messages per week during the holidays) doesn't seem to drive a lot of complaints for retailers with strong brand affinity.

Problem is, it doesn't drive that much response, either. Sending more messages is not enough. The messages must offer more value.

I spoke at the Shop.org Annual Summit this week and met with dozens of retailers who are doing great things to strengthen their brand relationships through social and multi channel experiences. Email is such an integral part of the ecommerce equation, so it's well past time to take it off auto pilot and start to improve relevancy through segmentation and added value.

I blogged about this at the Shop.org site. Let me know what your thoughts are - and if you'd like a copy of the full presentation.

In conversations with retailers about how to improve relevancy, one thing is very clear ...

Categories: Email Deliverability | Response

Political Deliverability is Personal

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

I recently worked the door at a fundraiser for a local community organization, held at a beautiful house in Denver's fanciest neighborhood. We four volunteers greeted many of Colorado's wealthiest, most influential, and most charitable people, asking them to sign in and handing them their name badges. This was the kind of event where the hosts expect everyone to donate at least $100 just to come in the door.

The fundraising director explained that the sign-in form was only to ensure that they had the correct information to provide tax receipts. In most cases, these generous people had donated in the past -- and thus were already in the big donor database. But if there was anything missing from the donation form, the sign-in form would provide additional ways to get in touch and clear up any questions.

Nearly everyone was fine with listing their name and home address. Many provided their phone numbers. Very few wrote down their email addresses. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Return Path Partners with Foro Abuses to Bring Certification to Spain

By Raymond Gannon
Director of Business Development, EMEA

I am very pleased to announce today a unique partnership between Return Path and Foro Abuses, a cooperative of ISPs in Spain. (You can learn more about them on their website in Spanish and English.)

Foro Abuses has for some time now run a whitelist aimed at reducing false positives and protecting Spanish email recipients from spam. When they learned about the Return Path Certification program and the high standards we place on our Certified level of whitelisting they were eager to include those senders on their whitelist. This is great news for marketers who are sending email into Spain. We have now added access to 16 million Spanish inboxes.

This is another step in our ongoing efforts to expand Return Path Certification around the world. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Prioritization of Spam at Gmail

By Melinda Plemel
Receiver Relationship Manager

UPDATE: The original version of this post had a link to the main Google YouTube channel, which had featured the spam video. After we published this, they swapped in a new video, causing confusion for some readers. We've now updated the link to go directly to the video about Gmail spam priorization. Sorry for any confusion we caused.

Google's Gmail can be somewhat of a mystery. They do things a bit differently than other large ISPs and they do it well. From our perspective in deliverability, Gmail is always a tougher ISP to understand and troubleshoot.

Most of the experts know that Gmail relies heavily on their user feedback and "this is spam" vs. "this is not spam" voting, but many questions remained around how they really prioritize complaints. Recently, they posted a video to YouTube that helps us understand just a little more and pull back a bit more of the mystery.

Google's Matt Cutts says Google does order complaints, and that typically, they try to think about what the impact is on the user. So, if they get ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

How Deliverability is Like SEO and SEM for Email

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

I admit this is an imperfect analogy, and I'm sure many of my colleagues in the email industry are going to blanch at a comparison to search, but the reality is that email deliverability is still not well understood -- and search engines are. I hope that I can make a comparison here that will help you better understand what it really means to work on deliverability - they same way you understand what it means to work on search.

But before we get to that, let's start with the language around deliverability which is still muddled. I'd like to encourage everyone in the email industry to rally around more precise meanings. Specifically I'd like propose that we start to use the term "inbox placement rate" or IPR, for short. I think this better explains what marketers mean when they say "delivered" - because anywhere other than the inbox is not going to generate the kind of response that marketers need. The problem with the term "delivered" is that it is usually used to mean "didn't bounce." While that is a good metric to track, it does not tell you where the email lands. Inbox placement rate, by contrast, is pretty straightforward: how much of the email you sent landed in the inbox of our customers and prospects?

Now let's come back to how achieving a high inbox placement rate is like search. If you run a web site, you certainly understand ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Mail.com Hosted by AOL

By Melinda Plemel
Receiver Relationship Manager

After some investigating, our sources confirm that now AOL (rather than Outblaze) is MXing the mail.com domain and many vanity domains operated by mail.com (accountant.com, bikerider.com, europe.com, etc. - see full list on mail.com website -- click on the "view all addresses" link in the top bar).

MXing the mail refers to how the email is being routed. Currently the mail passes through the server at AOL and then back to Outblaze. The mailboxes are not yet hosted at AOL but it seems they will be soon, and then they will be routed only to AOL.

For senders to mail.com and other domains that were once hosted by Outblaze this now means ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Tucows Feedback Loop Has Launched

I am very pleased to announce the public launch of the Tucows feedback loop. Return Path clients have had the benefit of participating in a private beta of the Return Path feedback loop since August 20. It is now available for the rest of the email universe at: http://fbl.hostedemail.com

Tucows is the third-largest wholesale domain registrar, providing Internet services, through its wholesale division known as OpenSRS, for more than 8 million domains. Tucows hosts millions of email inboxes on its OpenSRS Email Service. This feedback loop will cover all of those inboxes.

This follows in a long line of Return Path sponsored feedback loops including ...

Categories: Email Deliverability