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Email Deliverability Posts
Jun
03
By Tom Bartel
Chief Privacy Officer
In our recent webinar with the FTC we confirmed that the agency is open to continued industry self-regulation - as long as they see some action. I suspect that like me, most of us in the email industry prefer the self regulation ideal. We took the opportunity with our conversation with the FTC to point out many examples of how our industry works together to build and maintain trust in email with consumers.
We continue to have an opportunity as service providers and industry associations, to lead our industry by setting and adopting realistic best practices guidelines that businesses can implement. The email and advertising industries are graced with numerous agencies and associations doing just that, including the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), the Direct Marketing Association, the Email Experience Council, the Email Sender and Provider Coalition, Network Advertising Initiative and the Internet Advertising Bureau, to name a few. Each of these existing industry associations have produced best practice guidance that has resonated with us and helped us manage our businesses properly. The latest effort comes from the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) who has just released a timely draft of Online Trust Principles for public comment.
The thing about any set of principles, and these from the OTA are no exception ...
Categories: Email Deliverability
May
20
By Larry Ellis
Manager of Business Development
I recently ran across an article in the New York Times titled Spam and Global Warming?. Trust me, I was skeptical about this, how could email really be impacting our environment? The article was extracted from The Carbon Footprint of E-mail Spam Report published by McAfee which had some interesting information about the environmental impact of unwanted email.
I have always believed that email is generally free for the sender, but expensive for the recipient. But thinking about it as an irresponsible use of global resources was something that I just hadn't done before. Unfortunately, McAfee's research methodology has been called into question - seriously by spamnation and hysterically in a column by Ken Magill.
But even if spam does not contribute to global warming - at least not in a way that can be quantified ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
May
18
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
A digital marketer in France said to me the other day, "I don't need to worry about inbox deliverability, I have permission." I was shocked that this myth could be so firmly held by an otherwise smart and savvy email marketer. "Do you stop trying to earn a second sale just because you made the first?" I said. "Doesn't what you send and how you treat subscribers after they give you permission have anything to do with subscriber satisfaction?" He paused, and then agreed.
After all, it's subscriber satisfaction, not permission, that earns our place in the inbox and gives us a chance for a response and revenue. And subscriber satisfaction is all about the experience we create with every message, over time.
Consider that ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
May
11
by J.D. Falk, Director of Product Strategy, Receiver Services
Much as the term "pre-header" is now locked into email marketing parlance even though what it describes is neither pre- nor header, the term "reputation hijacking" continues to spread through the anti-spam community and the press.
"Reputation hijacking" is intended to describe when a spammer or other bad actor uses someone else's system -- usually one of the large webmail providers -- to send their spam. The idea is that in doing so, they're hijacking the reputation of the webmail provider's IPs instead of risking the reputation of IPs under their own control. But I really have to laugh (though mostly out of sadness) whenever this technique is described as something new.
The first spam I dealt with, way back in the mid-nineties, was sent by a user on a shell server. So was nearly all of the other spam of that era. Some was sent via Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, etc., but it was all from what today we'd call an individual end user's email account.
Then some of the spammers realized they could get dedicated servers -- and that worked for a while. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
May
05
By Daniel Deneweth
Sr. Director, Certification
We have some exciting news to share today about certification services from Return Path.
We have incorporated two different programs - Sender Score Certified and SafeList (formerly from Habeas) - into one program called Return Path Certification. By combining these two programs, Return Path has developed the largest and most respected whitelist program in the email universe that is based on this key premise - if you can trust the sender, you can trust their mail.
For senders to participate in the program, they need only complete one application to be considered for Return Path Certification's two levels of trust - Safe and Certified. To gain entry to our Safe level, senders must pass an audit of their email permission practices, privacy policy and legal compliance and show that they only send email from properly configured and authenticated servers. Then, companies whose reputation metrics identify them as "the best of the best" qualify for an automatic upgrade to the Certified level and gain access even more inboxes for no extra charge. Certified members also get special privileges like automatically enabled images and links at Windows Live Mail. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
28
By Melinda Plemel
Receiver Relationship Manager
I was recently at a big family reunion where I caught up with many relatives, some that I had not seen in more than twenty years. Of course one of the first couple of questions I was asked was what I do for a living. Well, it's easy to answer that question to people that work in the industry, but to the rest of the world it can be tricky.
Four years ago, when I began working with Return Path, I would describe the company by saying, "We are an email services company. We help businesses get their email delivered to people that want it, and help internet service providers better understand who is a good sender and who isn't".
The conversation would continue as follows: ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Apr
20
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
Email marketers in the UK, Germany and France are under a lot of pressure right now. The global recession, the tightening of spending by consumers, jobs being eliminated ... there is a lot of stress in the macro-economic environment today. Plus, there is stress in our micro-worlds. No one outside the email marketing world really understands what we do, how complex email marketing is or why it matters that we send subscribers messages that they love.
In fact, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising suggests further reduction in media and direct marketing spending, according to their Q4 2008 Bellwether Report released in January. Even internet search shows a reduction in spending, albeit significantly less than direct marketing and media, according to the study. Despite that bleak outlook, email budgets seem to be holding steady - mostly because email works really well. ...
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Apr
16
Social networks have exploded on the scene and continue to grow rapidly. However, their reputation in the industry has been mixed. Often, in their viral marketing efforts to reach more users, some social networks have crossed the line by participating in shady permission practices: spamming users' address books and encouraging their users to invite friends of friends of friends to join.
Now, several large social networks are rumored to soon be providing email service. It will be interesting to see ...
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Our new episode of Reputation Radio is available now on iTunes.
In our first segment we interview Return Path's own Matt Blumberg on the importance of reputation and what it means to the email universe. Then, in our Cool Email Ideas segment we interview Stephanie Colleton about emails sent during the U.S. presidential election.
Is there someone in the email universe you think we should interview? Do you have a question ...
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Apr
03
John Young, PhD
Director of Product Analytics
In part one of this posting we learned that the Sender Score reputation rank is correlated to delivered rates. So, what about complaints? Are they correlated to delivered rates? Again, yes, there is a strong (negative) linear relationship between delivered rates and complaint rates, which can be seen in the chart below. ...
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