Yahoo! and Sender Score Certified: Together At Last

Earlier this year we mentioned that Yahoo! would be joining Sender Score Certified. Well the time has arrived!

During the first week of January, Yahoo! will begin using Sender Score Certified status in their filtering decisions. This means that Sender Score Certified members will receive preferential treatment in reaching the inbox at Yahoo! Mail. This new benefit comes in addition to the long standing benefits at Hotmail, Cloudmark, Road Runner, Cox, SpamAssassin, Barracuda, and dozens of other email networks worldwide. This is extremely exciting news for all of our Sender Score Certified members.

In fact, current members will begin …

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Reputation Is No Longer Black and White

Comcast recently announced they are using Sender Score as a factor in determining if you are eligible to participate in their feedback loop program.

Basically, if you pass their threshold for “good” (Sender Score above 60), you’re in. If you appear below their threshold for “bad” (Sender Score below 30), you’re out. And if you are in-between (Sender Score between 30 and 60), they’ll factor in additional elements to determine your eligibility.

Reputation has evolved quite a bit in the receiver world. Not too long ago, the first reputation systems only gave binary answers. Most classified senders as bad (meaning they’d be blocked), or not bad (and thus not blocked) according to their own criteria. Others followed the model of …

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Asia Diary Day 3: Reviewing Spam Laws in Shanghai

During our APAC tour (previously written about here and here), we became more aware of interesting local laws attempting to legislate against spam. Please don’t interpret this as an official legal position (we aren’t lawyers, international or otherwise), but check out these policies:

Singapore: Marketers must mark their messages with the letters “ADV” for advertisement to make it easier for a consumer to direct unwanted mail to the electronic trash bin. Singapore supports “opt-out” mailing – a generally lower bar than requiring “opt-in.” If a consumer opts not to receive …

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Asia Diary Day 2: Meeting Receivers in Beijing

Last week I wrote about a deliverability seminar in Singapore with some of APAC’s top senders. During our Asia tour we also had a roundtable session with many of the top ISPS in China and Yahoo & Microsoft. The spirit of the session was a chance to improve communication and collaboration in the ISP community.

This is a brief summary of some of the comments expressed by these members of the Chinese ISP community:

• They have general problems with communication outside the region. Most of their interest is finding contacts and opening channels of communication to resolve network block issues. They want to know internal blacklist criteria and urge transparency. …

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Asia Diary Day 1: Meeting Senders in Singapore

Return Path recently co-hosted a deliverability seminar series in Asia titled “The Truth about Email Deliverability – How Reputation Impacts Email Deliverability.” I thought it might be interesting to share some of our experiences interacting with email senders in this large and growing region that is still learning how to interact with the rest of the internet community.

My big takeaway is that the APAC marketing community isn’t yet focused on deliverability and reputation so they are lagging the rest of the world in addressing these issues. Deliverability is still a relatively new concept for these senders. They are just beginning to understand that their subscribers are probably not receiving 20% of their emails.

But expect that to change – and quickly – as internet usage is exploding in the region.

Here are some real quotes from legitimate senders (e.g., large banks, airlines and newspaper publishers) from the audience …

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Return Path is Headed to MAAWG

Return Path is heading to the historic town of Heidelberg, Germany this week for MAAWG’s 13th General Meeting.

Look for our deliverability rock stars, George Bilbrey and J.D. Falk, moderating panels, answering questions and participating throughout the conference.

And, be sure to enjoy …

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The Comcast Feedback Loop is Available Exclusively from Return Path

We are very pleased to announce that Comcast now offers a complaint feedback loop, powered by Return Path. (For you deliverability nerds, you might note that we got beaten on this announcement by our friends at Deliverability.com. We appreciate the plug!)

Those of us who work in the industry feel like everyone should, by now, grok what a feedback loop is and why it’s so useful for both senders and end recipients of email. But we know that’s not completely true yet, so this seems like a good time to review the history and initial purpose of feedback loops.

When a user clicks the “report spam” button (or equivalent) in their mail client, a copy of that message (a spam “complaint”) is transmitted to their ISP. This type of system is generally only used by web-based mail clients such as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, or in custom desktop interfaces such as AOL’s, though some anti-spam vendors offer plug-ins for Outlook or Thunderbird. The ISP can use these reports, in aggregate, to update and improve their spam filters. …

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Return Path’s Partnership with Cloudmark Puts Email Subscribers First

We’re proud to announce that Cloudmark is using Return Path’s Sender Score Certified whitelist as a means of determining inbox placement for commercial email. Cloudmark provides spam filtering solutions for North American ISP customers including Earthlink, Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter, Telus and Cincinnati Bell and a global base of service provider customers including THUS, Tele2, Clara.net, Fastweb, NTT OCN and NEC BIGLOBE. They have joined the ranks of Windows Live Hotmail, GoDaddy and soon Yahoo! and many major corporations and educational institutions making the most comprehensive and widely used whitelist 1.2 billion inboxes strong.

We are very excited about what this means for marketers who understand the importance of maintaining high reputation standards to earn a valid spot in the inbox rather than paying for placement. But we are also excited about what this means for ISPs.

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