Remembering J.D.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write in 12 years as Return Path’s CEO. I hope it never has an equal.

One of our long-time employees, J.D. Falk, passed away today after a year-long struggle with cancer. J.D., which most people don’t know was short for Jesse David, was only 37 years old. Although I cannot claim to be a close friend of J.D.’s, I have known him fairly well in the industry going back about eight years, and he has been a trusted member of our team here for the last four+ years.

J.D. did great work for us at Return Path, but my admiration for him goes beyond that.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Cloudmark Email Filtering

Most marketers are not familiar with Cloudmark because they don’t host mailboxes nor do they operate under a recognized domain like hotmail.com or yahoo.com. However, they do provide anti-spam, phishing and virus protection to email providers covering over 1.6 billion mailboxes worldwide and are therefore a significant factor in getting your email delivered to your subscribers.

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Hotmail Launches Another Major Upgrade: What You Need to Know

Hotmail recently pushed another major update to help their users deal with the high amount of email they signed up for, called graymail, that will be slowly rolled out through the end of the year. While these tools will a major time saver for most Hotmail users, it could spell deliverability problems for your own email program. Here is a breakdown of the changes and what you should start thinking about now.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Comcast Inboxes

Comcast is the largest cable provider in the United States with 22 million subscribers comprising 32 million active mailboxes. Their email user base is made up of paid subscribers to their Internet service. Comcast provides a reliable email service with lots of storage. Unlike other North American cable providers, Comcast has invested significantly in their email service which includes a snappy Zimbra-based web interface.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to AOL Inboxes

You’ve got mail! After more than a decade, AOL is still a major webmail player in the United States. Most reports rank AOL #4 in total mailboxes behind Microsoft Hotmail Live, Yahoo! and Gmail respectively. The company has a global reach but its presence is about half of the other major players if you count their number of worldwide mailboxes.

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KISS (The Email Marketing Version)

I was recently reminded of one of the first marketing lessons I learned over 12 years ago: KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). With technology so rapidly changing, it’s gotten easier and easier to overwhelm ourselves and our subscribers with communication: Newsletters! Triggered Alerts! Facebook Offers! Twitter Tips! So, I took this reminder as a point of inspiration to create an email marketing version of the long-time marketing rule.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Gmail Inboxes

Gmail has had a relatively short life compared to the other large webmail providers such as Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL. Gmail launched in beta in 2004, became available to the general public in 2007 and officially launched out of beta in July 2009. According to our research Gmail closed 2010 with 193 million users, which is less than Yahoo! and Hotmail, but it is adding new users at a much faster rate than these two providers.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Microsoft Hotmail Email Inboxes

Microsoft is the largest email provider in the world hosting over a billion mailboxes with 350 million active users. More than 8 billion emails are handled each day with 30-35% of those emails making it to the inbox. 1 Microsoft’s brands and domains include Windows Live Hotmail (hotmail.com), MSN (msn.com) and Windows Live (live.com). The most popular domain of the three is by far Hotmail.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Yahoo! Inboxes

Yahoo! Mail was one of the first free webmail providers to hit the market and is one of the three largest providers in the world with 280+ million users. If you include some of the smaller providers that utilize the Yahoo! infrastructure such as AT&T and BellSouth there are 320+ million users. Even though they are one of the oldest and biggest ISPs in the market they have continued to attract and cater to a relatively young social audience compared to other free webmail providers. Yahoo!’s anti-spam team is also one of the most active and responsive groups in the industry when it comes to clear communications and responsiveness to senders.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to ISPs and Deliverability

Email marketers are intensely focused on ROI for their marketing dollars. Maximizing the number of clicks, opens and conversions is the primary method that ROI is measured for most marketers. However, maximizing all of these response metrics requires that your email is delivered to your subscribers’ inbox by the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This metric is commonly referred to as deliverability or inbox placement rate.

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