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Feb
2
Sender Score Certified Footprint Expands
Co-Founder, President
This week we announced a partnership with Bizanga, the global provider of a top-notch email processing platform, to increase the efficiency of sender verification for its service provider partners. Now, they will allow their customers to use the Sender Score Certified whitelist in addition to Sender Score Reputation Monitor data to vet incoming senders for the thousands of domains their technology covers.
This is great news for ISPs and other receivers using Bizanga, as their filtering options have just gotten stronger. The combination of Sender Score Certified and our reputation data allows receivers to vet all incoming email — and block up to 60% — just based on sender reputation. This allows them to decrease the amount of erroneously filtered email, as well. …
Categories: Commentary Comments Off
Jan
2
Gmail Bug: Internet Axis of Evil & Importance of Complaint Rates
Co-Founder, President
Gmail has a bug that exposes your Gmail account address book if: (1) you have Gmail open; (2) you (like me) run Firefox and (3) you visit a malicious website site that runs a script calling for the address book. I haven’t been able to confirm whether this has been fixed. You can read a better description of the problem here.
I’d be willing to bet that the “blackhats” found this hole a while ago and have harvested quite a few addresses. There is a ready market for ….
Categories: News Comments Off
Dec
7
New Spam Techniques Make Reputation Key
Co-Founder, President
Anyone with an email account doesn’t need to be told that spam volumes are up. Most people see it for themselves every time they open their inbox. This is straining the resources of major receivers (as we wrote about last month) and causing increased blocking – both temporary and permanent – for many commercial senders.
Yesterday’s article in the New York Times got the story only partially right. Yes, the spam volume is up and administrators are struggling. But the suggestion that reputation data is not helping them in the fight is just plain wrong. …
Categories: Commentary Comments Off
Nov
30
Free reputation data, at your fingertips
Co-Founder, President
More than 80 percent of email delivery failures happen because of email reputation. If the sender’s reputation is less than stellar, the email will get blocked or filtered. Call me crazy, but that makes email reputation important to get right! Most companies, however, do not have a clue what their email reputation is, or where to start looking for it.
Now, that answer is easy: go to www.senderscore.org. …
Categories: Return Path Comments Off
Oct
12
Reputation is King 83% of the Time
Co-Founder, President
It’s official. The endless hours spent tweaking your content to beat spam filters are not necessary after all. When it comes to email blocking and filtering, reputation — not content — can be blamed 83% of the time.
We have long held this to be true, and now can back up our opinions and experiences with real numbers. A study we released this week that shows that sender reputation causes 77% of delivery failures, while an additional 6% are triggered by the reputation of domains included in the email content. …
Categories: Commentary Comments Off
Aug
29
Hotmail delivery issues? Think Sender Score Certified.
Co-Founder, President
Today’s Email Insider column details three steps legit marketers should take to get delivered to Hotmail. It leaves off one of the most obvious — Return Path’s Sender Score Certified. Hotmail – and more than 150K other domains — use Sender Score Certified as a “safelist” to separate reputable senders from bad ones. If delivery to Hotmail is important to you …
Categories: Commentary Comments Off
Jul
28
Hijacking? So not the point
Co-Founder, President
The research brief we released earlier this week on email reputation has created quite a stir — and not all of it accurate. Stories like the ones here, here, and here report that 97% of email is spam, sent from hijacked computers. This is not necessarily the case. For one, we were not talking about the share of spam out there — were were talking about the percent of IP addresses likely sending spam. What our research showed is that 97% of IP addresses sending email have terrible reputations. Are they spammers? Most likely. Are they hijacking computers? Maybe. Will they earn inbox delivery? No.
The point of our study is that of those sending high volumes of commercial email, most have terrible Sender Scores (our gauge of reputation) ….
Categories: Commentary Comments Off
Jul
25
97% of IP addresses worthy of blocking
Co-Founder, President
Ninety-seven percent of the email senders out there have terrible reputations. They aren’t just suspect, they aren’t just a little bit bad … they are in the bottom of the barrel — scoring less than 30 according to our Sender Score Reputation Monitor. Sender Scores less than 30 are highly likely to get blocked by email receivers. Scores higher than 70 are most likely to get delivered — yet not even 1% of mailers make that cut.
So what does this mean for the average commercial emailer? Reputation is the key to inbox delivery. You need to know what your Sender Score is – think of it like your credit score for email. Then you need to ….
Categories: Research Comments Off
Jun
28
Greetings from Brussels
Co-Founder, President
Several times a year the anti-spam community gets together for the general meetings of the Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). It may be an outrageously bad acronym but it’s a great meeting to hear what the largest ISPs and other spam-fighters are thinking about spam and how to fight it. This summer the meeting is in Brussels. A few themes and factoids that might be interesting to marketers were clear during the conversations and presentations. These include:
– Many of the ISPs that have yet to use reputation based filtering are heading in that direction.
– There has been much less conversation about the mechanics of different authentication techniques than in past conferences. However, it doesn’t seem that …
Categories: News Comments Off
May
17
One way to keep spam traps off your list
Co-Founder, President
Having spam traps on your email list causes a world of problems: listings on commonly used blacklists and blocks at top ISPs. For the uninitiated, a spam trap is usually an address that was created new and never signed up to receive any mailings. Therefore, by definition, all mail going to that account is unsolicited. This is a great tool to catch spammers who will often mail to addresses that they have harvested from web sites and newsgroups where the good folks who run the spam trap network have published their spam trap email addresses.
So how do legitimate marketers get spam traps on their lists? In our experience, there are three primary ways: (1) Bad luck – when entering an email address in a signup form, the user makes a typo and suddenly you’re a proud owner of a spam trap address; (2) Bad partners – one of your data partners (co-registration, etc.) sent you some spam traps …
Categories: Commentary Comments Off