Social Networking and Email

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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Email Best Practices Matter, No Matter Who You Are

If you haven’t followed Return Path through the length of our existence you may not know that our original business was an Email Change of Address service. This is a consumer service in which we facilitated re-connection of email relationships after an individual had moved to a new email service – the email equivalent of the United States Postal Service change of address form for when you move to a new house or apartment. It’s a pretty cool idea, which is why we recently sold it to Fresh Address, who will keep it running. You should give it a try.

In the process of running the service for more than eight years we acquired over 20 million customer records. In compliance with our privacy policy as part of the sale we sent a Change of Control Notice to these customers. The notice informed our customers of the new ownership, and gave them the opportunity to opt-out of the service before the data was sent to Fresh Address.

All of the email addresses were collected using the double opt-in method, however it had been quite a while since many of these customers had been sent email from Return Path. In many cases, it had been years. Yes, not routinely mailing our customers flies in the face of good email hygiene best practices – the practices we regularly recommend to our clients. We see the irony. But the Change of Control Notice is a promise we’d made to these customers in our privacy policy, and it’s required by the law in some jurisdictions, so we had to send the email.

So now what do we do? …

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Fighting Spam in the New Economy

Happy New Year! Every January I take some time to reflect on recent industry trends and make some predictions and goals for the coming year. Needless to say, 2008 economic events have made a strong impact all around the globe. The anti-spam community, like many others, is bracing and already seeing the impact.

When times are tough, more people turn to crime. In the email business, this means spam and spam efforts will continue to increase. This includes pure evil spammers, who will redouble-efforts to get their annoying spam-messages in your inbox as well as semi-legitimate marketers, feeling the pinch of the economy, who will be tempted to be overly aggressive with their marketing campaigns and whose emails will cross the line from welcomed to unwelcomed and/or “spam”. The folks who are caught in the crosshairs of this issue are the ISPs and the email administrators – trying to sort through this increasing tide of junk mail while also being asked to make budget cuts.

That’s why I’m calling 2009 “The Year of Collaboration” among the ISP community. …

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The Root of All Email

This week, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published a number of what they call “RFCs,” which originally meant “Requests for Comment” — the standards documents which specify the technical underpinnings of the internet. Two of these, numbered 5321 and 5322, replace earlier documents defining the very core of internet email. On the surface, each of these seem surprisingly simple; one aims “…to transfer mail reliably and efficiently,” while the other defines itself as “…a definition of what message content format is to be passed between systems.” Yet without general industry-wide acceptance of (and compliance with) these standards, internet email simply would not exist.

This week also marks ten years since the death of Jon Postel, who arguably had more influence over the creation of the internet than any other single person. One of Jon’s most enduring recommendations is …

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Anatomy of Forged Spam

and Neil Schwartzman, Manager, Compliance and ISP Relations

We recently detected a recent spam run that used the domain of one of Return Path’s businesses – Postmaster Direct. The spammers used some of our header and footer information to make the messages look even more like legitimate mail coming from Return Path. The spam was also noted in a couple of blogs.

This sort of attack is known in the anti-spam community as a “Joe Job” – named for, literally, a guy named Joe Doll, founder of Joe’s Cyberpost, which was attacked in this way as an act of revenge some years ago.

So, let’s use this as an educational opportunity to take a look at how spam and botnets work. Let’s take a look at one example spam:

1. The sending machines appear to be compromised (meaning they were infected by a virus or Trojan horse, known more recently in the industry as “malware”): The sending IP addresses are from all over the planet. Malaysia, China, and Spain. For example, one domain appears to be …

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A Belated 2007 Year in Review with a Look Ahead to 2008

We waited a little while to make sure that 2007 was really and truly over before noting the interesting trends for the year. With a fair degree of certainty we can predict that 2007 won’t return. After polling some of the smarter folks about deliverability at Return Path, here are some of the trends that we found interesting over the last year and what we think will happen in ’08.

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Spammer indictment is good news for the email industry

I’ve always maintained that spam does not make one great, but Al Ralsky kept a relatively high profile for long enough that his unwelcome intrusions into our inboxes – and our friends’ inboxes, and our parents’ inboxes, and our children’s inboxes – will be long remembered.

Today the entire email industry is cheering the arrest and indictment of Ralsky and his gang, which was reported in the Detroit Free Press this morning. It’s obviously good news for anti-spammers, who have been clamoring for prosecutions of illegal spamming activity for more than a decade. But it’s also wonderful news for the email marketing industry, which has been trying to show the world that they aren’t spammers. Now, the marketers can point to Ralsky’s illegal activities and state with one voice: “we do not do these awful things.”

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How to Impress the ISPs

I’ve been working on email for more than a decade, and I’ve met a lot of people from all sides of the industry. When working on Yahoo! Mail and before that on Microsoft’s MSN Hotmail, I was very popular at industry conferences. People would interrupt each other to introduce themselves, seek out my opinion, hand me their business cards, and so forth. It was really quite disconcerting.

I can understand why they thought it was necessary. In business, in politics, in almost every aspect of most peoples’ lives, building relationships is inherent to accomplishing pretty much anything. But when it comes to deliverability, fawning over ISP staff will not get your mail where you want it to go. That’s simply not how email operates.

In my experience, many marketers and other large-volume email senders confuse the tactics that will make the ISP staff like you with the tactics that will actually get your email to the inbox. …

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Another View on Email Authentication

In an Email Insider column last week, Chad White wrote about the adoption of authentication processes and gave what we believe is a false impression that authentication is a sort-of annoying task that belongs down in the IT basement.

We believe authentication is something that should be front and center on the mind of every marketing executive. While they don’t need to know every technical detail, they should understand what it is and be able to ask intelligent questions of the IT folks so they can make sure the standards are being implemented.

In reporting that 43% of legitimate email volume is certified by Sender ID (a stat from Microsoft) and 48% of retailers have implemented DomainKeys, Chad sees the glass as half-full – most people authenticate, so let’s just get past this already.

We hate to be the pessimists here, but this glass looks a little more than half empty to us …

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The Industry Sets a New Standard

In a vast sea of associations, The Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group is an interesting organization. Its focus is on preventing abuse of all sorts of messaging platforms, especially email. And it’s also unique in that it takes a three-pronged approach to the problem: collaboration between receivers and senders, technology solutions and public policy. For all these reasons and more Return Path is proud to be an active MAAWG member.

In the spirit of receiver and sender collaboration, they yesterday announced the release of the “MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices.” (There is also an executive summary of the document that helps to explain some of the more technical aspects in terms that marketers and executives are likely to understand.)
This document focuses on five core areas that are important for both marketers and operations professionals …

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