An Email Retrospective

We’re pleased to present a special report on the top ten email trends in 2009 based on our experiences working with top marketers and the world’s leading ISPs. We hope this look back will help you look forward and make 2010 the best year yet for email.

The Top 10 Emails Trends in 2009 include:

1. Spam growth continues – Estimated daily spam volumes for 2009 were more than 117 billion emails per day. In addition, image spam increased in 2009, a problem for enterprises and ISPs using outdated email security software.

2. False positives increase – 2009 also saw a rise in “false positives”. This is when a legitimate, requested, and wanted email is mistakenly blocked outright or delivered to a bulk folder by a spam filter. ISPs increased their use of trusted whitelists in an effort to more accurately identify legitimate email and prevent false positives.

3. Phishing impacts everyone – Criminal enterprises phished even more 2009 – sending forged emails purporting to be from banks, social networks, and brand marketers to gain access to account information. Return Path recommends authenticating your email as a way to combat phishing.

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INDUSTRY ALERT: COX has a new Postmaster Page

Congratulations to our partners at COX for launching a new postmaster site.

Lots of ISPs have postmaster pages, so what’s the big deal about this one?

It’s frequently difficult to get all the information you might need to understand the rules of the road at an ISP. The Cox postmaster pages provide error code definitions, preferred connection configurations, instructions on how to sign up for Cox’s feedback loop (which is proudly powered by Return Path) and other useful information to help understand delivery issues. …

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Prioritization of Spam at Gmail

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 …

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Mail.com Hosted by AOL

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 …

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More Spam? Say it ain't so!

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 …

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Wait, what do you do?

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: …

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Road Runner Teams Ups with Return Path to Launch a Feedback Loop

In our ongoing quest to champion inbox standards and make email better we have just launched a feedback loop for Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service. We are very excited to be expanding our partnership with Road Runner by offering a service that will reduce customer complaints and filtering errors.

As a special benefit to our clients, this service has been available to Return Path clients for the past month. It is now available for the rest of the email universe at: http://feedback.postmaster.rr.com.

As one of the top five mailbox providers in the United States, Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner will be an extremely valuable feedback source. This follows in a long line of Return Path sponsored feedback loops including …

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One Billion Now Being Served

I drove by McDonald’s this weekend and was surprised to see that they have 99 billion now being served. I remember when they went from 99 million to 1 billion and wondered how much higher it could go. Well, the number of those that eat at McDonald’s continues to grow but let’s leave that discussion for another time.

The real news in our industry is the fact that we’ve passed the 1 billion mark on internet users. In an article written in CircleID last week, they have stated that there are over 1 billion unique users on the internet. One billion?? The number seems unreal but if we look at it more closely, that only encompasses 15 – 20% of the world’s population, which doesn’t seem like a lot. …

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Get in the Loop

We are very proud to announce the public release of a new feedback loop service for all BlueTie-hosted domains, including excite.com, iwon.com and myway.com. Other ISPs including Comcast, Cox, USA.net and Mailtrust have implemented feedback loops from Return Path and have seen complaints drop by 20-40%. We expect this feedback loop to result in a similar reduction in spam complaints and increased customer satisfaction. Excite previously offered a feedback loop, but BlueTie decided to outsource this service to Return Path and bring it up to industry standard best practices.

The feedback loop (FBL) service is available free of charge to approved parties sending email to BlueTie-hosted domains and will forward any mail reported as spam originating from the associated IP addresses back to the requested abuse email addresses defined during the FBL registration process.

The feedback loop is now available to…

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