How Inactive Addresses Hurt Deliverability plus 3 Tips on What to Do

Inactive subscribers are a liability to anyone who sends email. They hurt deliverability, which in turn reduces your response rates, and before you know it, your email program isn’t making as money as it used to. Marketing managers usually understand that the key is to get rid of the deadweight to solve these problems, but most executives try to solve the revenue problem through a numbers game and sending to even more email addresses, many of which are inactive as well. So why should you care about removing inactive addresses?

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A follow-up on Marketing Sherpa’s webinar “Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation”

Return Path and Marketing Sherpa joined forces to present a webinar on how to deal with complains. The turnout and questions were great. So great in fact, that we ran out of time to answer them all. Along with Marketing Sherpa co-presenter Adam Sutton, we decided to answer the questions in a two part blog series. Here’s the first.

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Warming Up IP Addresses: 5 Steps for Faster Inbox Placement

If you had talked to any email marketer 10 years ago and asked them how they dealt with blocks on their IP addresses, the answer would probably be the same: “We just switched IPs.” Not only was this an unfortunate, albeit effective, way to deal with blocks, it also became a common method used by spammers. They would simply send from one IP address for a very short time and then move on to another, either with IPs they owned or through hijacked computers controlled by botnets. Because of spammers’ behaviors, ISPs and email providers respond by temporarily blocking and limiting the amount of email a new IP address could send. ISPs now treat any new sending IP address like a dog on a short leash, and only extend the leash when the senders’ reputation is proven. To minimize the impact of having to move to a new IP address, consider the following:

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Canadian Anti-Spam Law: A Compliance Guide for Marketers

The Fighting Internet & Wireless Spam Act (FISA, Bill C-28) is wending it’s way through the legislative process in Canada.

Canada may be late to the game of anti-spam legislation, but their bill C-28 is a game-changer for bad senders and spammers.

In anticipation of the new law, Return Path partnered with Thindata 1:1…

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Managing background colors in Hotmail on Firefox

[Editor's Note: This post was amended based on feedback that our fix didn't work in Chrome/Webkit. We found a new fix, which is what is reflected below in the discussion section. Keep that feedback coming!]


Our rendering experts have observed some changes with the treatment of color backgrounds within the new Windows Live Hotmail when viewed in Firefox.

We’ve known for some time that setting a page background color using the body tag is a no-go; it gets ignored or stripped in a wide swath of webmail clients. The solution was instead to wrap the whole email within one 100% width table, and set that table’s background to the desired color. Problem solved.

Now, however, this no longer works in Hotmail on Firefox.

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Code Fix for Gmail Rendering Problems

Gmail recently implemented changes to its webmail environment that are adversely affecting how images are displayed in most browsers. We’ve created the below FAQ that describes the changes and some simple HTML code inclusions that will rectify these image display issues.

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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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Before You Get Famous Protect Your Email Account

By now, you have likely heard about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin having joined the redoubtable ranks of famous people like Paris Hilton and Chester Charlie Bennington (the lead singer of Linkin Park) whose email accounts have been hacked.

Like the Alaskan tundra, the Internet can be a scary, cold, dangerous place. But if the proper precautions are taken, risk of obvious dangers can be reduced significantly. So, whether you’ve been thrust into the spotlight recently or not, we’d like to nominate the following precautions and hope they get your vote …

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Case Study: Web 2.0 Runs on Email

It’s fashionable in many circles to toll the death knell for email. Part of the reason for that is the rise of Web 2.0 – blogging, social networking, and other methods of interaction that supposedly make email obsolete.
The funny thing is, Web 2.0 tends to rely pretty heavily on email. All those LinkedIn and Facebook emails are the things that drive huge amounts of activity on the sites.

Take Twitter as another example. While Twitter has successfully created a whole new communication method (complete with the verb “to Twitter” and the noun “tweet”) a large number of their new members come through email. Specifically they come from peer-initiated email, aka forward to a friend email. Unfortunately for them, a lot of that email was being blocked or junked. This is a common problem for any company that has email forwarding on their site.

Fortunately for Twitter …

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Are Spammers Spoofing Your Newsletter?

You may have heard recently about spammers sending out scads of their usual garbage with topical subject lines referring to the Chinese satellite issue, or the terrible storms taking place in Europe. These messages are actually Trojans intending to infect unwitting recipients. This is a typical social engineering trick to garner better open rates, a variance on subject lines like “About the meeting today” or “Dont understand, hope u can help.”

But now, spammers have discovered a new tactic that has serious implications for the sender community. According to Symantec, spammers are now forging email to look like it is coming from the publishers of legitimate newsletters and email streams. Just as phishing has hampered financial services move into email, this type of spam will have serious negative impact on legitimate senders caught up in this deception.

There are a few steps you can take to mitigate any damage …

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