Aug
20
Several online sources have commented on a paper recently published by a research group at Yahoo! on voluntary email "stamps," which has generated a lot of speculation. Our contacts at Yahoo! tell us this idea is purely in the research realm, and is not scheduled for development in Yahoo! Mail. In other words: it isn't even vaporware and isn't likely to be a part of the Yahoo! mail system anytime soon. (It is also worth noting that Yahoo! did not intend to publicize anything about this research, because it is in such an early stage.)
Of course as readers of this blog know, Yahoo! continues to use the Return Path Certified whitelist as a factor in ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Aug
19
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
The brouhaha over the reports that some Americans felt the email messages the White House sent them about health care reform were spam has the nice side effect of generating some great PR for permission. Isn't it lovely to see politicians, government workers and Fox News broadcasters up in arms over the fact that some people may be on the file but not have actually signed up for White House emails (depending on your politics, you may see different motives, but that's a different matter)? (Honestly, it amounts to the same thing if these citizens did indeed sign up, but just don't remember.) Bottom line: Permission matters in email marketing. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability | News
Aug
17
by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
Alongside the rise of Twitter and its famously 140-character message size limit has come an explosion in URL shorteners like bit.ly and tr.im. But with spammers gleefully abusing these systems and some shortening services on the verge of disappearing, we must question whether the use of URL shorteners in any other medium -- such as email -- is a wise practice.
A URL shortening service takes a long web address like https://hostedjobs.openhire.com/epostings/submit.cfm?fuseaction=app.allpositions&company_id=15953&version=1, and converts it to something short (but often even more obscure) like http://bit.ly/9sUe3. When you click on the shortened link, your web browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, et cetera) contacts the shortening service's web server just like any other request for a web page. Most services will reply with a simple HTTP Redirect, telling your browser to go open the longer URL instead. A few open the target URL in a frame, with a bar at the top encouraging you to share the site too -- while tracking your activities, and possibly showing ads.
These services have been around for years: TinyURL, which was for a long time the most popular, launched in 2002 and was almost immediately adopted by pranksters. One memorable prank was ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Aug
03
by J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
You've probably heard about botnets by now -- those networks of home computers infected by viruses or other malware, controlled en masse by some shadowy bad guys. Botnets are used to send most of the world's spam, attack web sites, steal credit card numbers and other personal information, or other nefarious activities -- for anyone, for a fee.
Broadband connections are so prevalent these days, all over the world, that botnet operators can pick and choose which infected computers are sufficiently high-bandwidth for their needs. But these broadband connections all flow through one ISP or another, so ISPs are very aware of the problem -- and extremely concerned.
Today MAAWG released a paper aimed at helping these ISPs, titled "MAAWG Common Best Practices for Mitigating Large Scale Bot Infections in Residential Networks." It's the product of many discussions, including many of the leading experts. "As an industry," MAAWG Chair Michael O'Reirdan said in the press release, "we are becoming more proactive in alerting customers when bots are detected on their computers and in helping users remove the malware before it can harm them."
It'll take some time, and a lot of work, but the effectiveness of botnets will -- after a while -- be reduced. And then what? Now that they've gotten a taste of all the money to be made, the botnet operators won't go back to flipping perogies. They'll find another way.
That'd be you. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
By George Bilbrey
President
This week is definitely an exciting week for mail. MySpace announced the introduction of MySpace Mail, a uniquely MySpace twist on mail that blends the best of social networking and traditional mail.
Return Path has contended for some time that social networking is not a death knell for mail. In fact, we have always believed that people would want to have mail integrated into their social networking experience and have grown tired of siloed communications (i.e., messages confined within a network as opposed to being open to all). We applaud this move by MySpace as it's giving consumers what they want: Full-fledged mail integrated within their MySpace experience.
MySpace, meanwhile, has created a mail system that has a lot of anti-spam technology built right in. And they are doing this, in part, with help from Return Path. The new @myspace.com mail service will be integrated with ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jul
29
By Tom Sather, Director, Professional Services
and
J.D. Falk, Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
Imagine if your reputation was linked to your domain name, rather than your IP addresses.
It would eliminate the need to "warm up" servers - a situation that exists now because ISPs are wary of new IP addresses with no sending history. Domain reputation would essentially make reputation portable - you could add new IPs, you could move IPs, you could send mail from different systems, even different ESPs - and you'd still enjoy the benefits of your good reputation.
The domain name is part of your brand identity, part of the "you" that you're trying to portray to your customers. An IP address is just a string of numbers.
Of course, the flip side is a bad reputation will also be portable. To some extent, this has always been true. ISPs have used the reputation of domains to block content for a long time now. This is why some companies that used bad third-party marketers found that their "regular" email took a hit when the links in both types of email got tarnished and caused blocking.
So why aren't ISPs using domains for good reputation, too? Unfortunately, the IP address has for decades been the only thing - the only "identifier" - associated with a message which cannot be forged. Enter authentication, which we talk about all the time on this blog. When a message is authenticated with a domain, the receiving site knows that the message really did come from that domain - which makes domain reputation possible.
Ken Magill has joined the conversation by writing a story on domain reputation, causing renewed buzz in the industry.
According to Magill's story AOL will implement a domain reputation system sometime ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jul
27
By Cherie Ansari
Professional Services Consultant
Last week AOL announced on its postmaster blog changes to the way it will be handling mailer daemon errors.
What does this mean for large-volume email senders? You should expect to see a change in the From: address, as well as the number of asynchronous bounces you receive from AOL. Asynchronous bounces occur after the SMTP conversation, which means that the ISP accepts the senders' email first and then rejects it later. As a result, the bounce notifications trickle in minutes to days after the initial send in the form of an email. This is different from ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
When a new iPhone or Palm device is released or Google announces a new OS, everybody hears about it. These are, for a short time, the shiniest thing in the tech world. One reason for this phenomenon -- perhaps the primary reason -- is that they directly affect end users. They're things that early adopters drool over and stand in line for, while slower adopters ask "Why would I want that? My 8-track player still works perfectly." In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether domestic telecommunications companies have been engaging in "monopolistic and anticompetitive practices" again -- which could have much larger, longer-lasting effects on how we access and utilize the internet in this country. But, it's not shiny and immediate, so that gets far less attention.
Even in the email industry, shininess is rarely an accurate indication of importance or impact. Google removed the "beta" label from Gmail a few weeks ago, but Gmail is still basically the same as it was before. Spammers are mentioning Michael Jackson more often than they did before he died, but so is everyone else. And Return Path has published two more studies, proving twice again that email marketers need to pay more attention to deliverability. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jul
23
By George Bilbrey
President
As reported in Lifehacker, Gmail is now providing an unsubscribe option for mailing lists to users. They are doing this using the mailto: type of the List-Unsubscribe header. This means that you can get a complaint message in ARF format when someone unsubscribes from you at Gmail.
How do you take advantage? According to the Gmail postmaster: ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jul
22
By Guy Shelton
Vice President Sales & Client Services, Europe
American marketers have been aware for some time now that the email they send doesn't always make it to the inbox as intended. But this is not the case for marketers in Europe, as we found in a recent survey: Emailing in the Dark: What European Email Marketers Don't Understand about Deliverability.
In fact, we found that nearly 2 out of 5 marketers surveyed weren't sure if their email is making it to the inbox. More troubling still, 38% believe that deliverability is the sole responsibility of the email service provider who sends the email on their behalf. As we've written here, here and here, the ESP cannot completely control your deliverability. In fact, most of the factors that lead to blocking by top ISPs are ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
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