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

Privacy Policy Best Practices: Benefit from Better Disclosure

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting

Data is the crack-cocaine of email marketing. The more you get, the more you want, and marketers are often incredibly greedy when it comes to collecting data, asking for information they don't really need and often never use. Some marketers can even be secretive about their collection practices, and don't want their subscribers to know how or where their information is being collected, what it's going to be used for and who it's going to be shared with.

However, the reality is that marketers do need data to create relevant experiences for their customers and prospects; without data, targeting, personalization and segmentation would be impossible. It's to the subscriber's benefit to share their information (within reason) and give marketers a sense of who they are, what they like, where they live, how and when they'd like to be contacted and what they want from an email relationship with the marketer.

Where marketers often fall short is respecting that subscribers took the time to give them their information and remembering that the relationship is really all about the subscriber (not a forum for the marketer's press releases, product updates or company news). They can also come up short when ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

AOL Cancels Report Cards

Yesterday the AOL postmaster site announced that they will no longer be sending report cards to people on the AOL feedback loop when their complaint rate crosses a certain threshold (.30%).

We've always recommended our clients keep a close eye on their feedback loop data as one way to maximize their deliverability. When complaint rates spike, it's time to take a deeper look at your messaging campaign and any recent changes that may have negatively impacted complaint rates -- policy and practices changes are ultimately the key to ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Episode #11 of Reputation Radio is LIVE!

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

In this episode, we talk to George Bilbrey about metrics of email deliverability. Learn the whole story on inbox placement rates and find out how to get the data you need to make smart decisions.

Is there someone in the email universe you think we should interview? Do you have a question about ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

More Spam? Say it ain't so!

By Melinda Plemel
Receiver Relationship Manager

A recent flurry of articles on the increase of spam, have focused on the likelihood that we will continue to see a rise in the percentage of spam in overall email volumes:

• All Spammed Up reported "that spam has increased over 141% since March and also found that spam volumes grow by over 117 billion e-mails a day"
• McAfee has reported that in a little less than five months there has been a 140% increase in total spam volume. Reported causes are the 16% rise in botnet infections from Q1 2009 to Q2 2009. Many are also pointing a finger at the exploitation of social-networking sites for sending spam.
• MX Logic recently released their July 2009 Threat Forecast report claiming that "Spam as a percentage of overall mail has reached its highest point ever, currently accounting for 94.6 percent of all e-mail"

It looks as though this is a trend we will continue to see reported by security vendors.

So, what does this really mean for the email universe ...

Categories: Email Deliverability