Almost 20% of Commercial, Permissioned Emails Never Reached U.S. & Canadian Consumer Inboxes in the Second Half of 2009, According to New Return Path Email Deliverability Benchmark Report

New York, NY – As commercial email senders increasingly turn to email marketing to help drive sales and attract new customers, problems remain in ensuring that requested emails successfully reach consumer inboxes. In the second half of 2009, 19.9% of commercial, permissioned emails never reached consumers inboxes in the United States and Canada, a slight improvement from January – June 2009 when 20.7% of commercial, permmissioned emails failed to reach consumers inboxes, according to the new Return Path Email Deliverability Benchmark Report. European inbox placement rates fared slightly better with 15% of requested, permissioned emails never reaching consumer inboxes.

Permissioned email reached only 80.1% of consumer inboxes in the United States and Canada during the second half of 2009 (July through December), a .8% increase from the 79.3% inbox placement rate recorded in the first half of 2009. In the United States and Canada, 3.5% of those emails were delivered to a “junk” or “bulk” email folder and 16.3% were missing or not delivered at all – with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery. In Europe, 85.5% of emails reached consumers inboxes, 3.6% of emails were delivered to a “junk” or “bulk” folder, and 11% of emails were missing or not delivered at all. In the Asia Pacific region, inbox placement of permissioned emails was higher in the second half of 2009 with 86.9% of emails reaching the inbox. 10.7% of emails were missing or not delivered and 2.5% of emails were delivered to a “junk” or “bulk” folder.

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SpamAssasin Rarely Misses

SpamAssassin is, by any measure, the most popular open source spam filtering software. It has won numerous awards, and has been incorporated into many commercial filtering appliances. On Tuesday, the SpamAssassin developers announced version 3.3.0, their first major update since 2007.

SpamAssassin was born in 2001, when Justin Mason (who is still involved in the project) rewrote & updated an earlier open-source filtering script. At present it primarily consists of a set of message tests of varying complexity, each analyzing portions of the headers or body and adding to or subtracting from the resulting spam score.

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Episode #14 of Reputation Radio is LIVE!

Our new episode of Reputation Radio is now available on iTunes.

In this episode, we interview Peter Blair, Security Specialist at Tucows. Blair discusses the biggest misconceptions among marketers about deliverability and how ISPs handle mail. Blair also talks about Tucows’ Feedback Loop for email senders, and he discusses the recent debate about ISPs use of engagement metrics as part of email deliverability.

Is there someone in the email universe you think we should interview? Do you have a question about email deliverability or sender reputation>? Call (320) 52EMAIL (523-6245) and leave a message. Or, email us: podcast@returnpath.net. We might use your question in a future episode.

Listen to episode 14 now and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Reputation Radio.

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A Word of Warning about your Donation to Charity

Many of us have seen the heart-wrenching scenes from the world’s latest natural disaster, in Haiti, and want to help.

Unfortunately, there are some who would take advantage of the situation, and people’s charitable nature, and put fraudulent requests for money online. As Linda McGlasson over at the Bank Info Security blog said ‘there Is a special place in hell’ for people like this.

Let’s hope so, because the sad, awful truth of it is that Symantec is reporting that they have already seen spam fraudulently claiming to be from the Red Cross, soliciting donations for Haitian Earthquake relief funds. There have been sporadic reports of fraudulent tweets on Twitter, and some Google search results have been skewed in an attempt to divert people to malware and phishing sites.

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The Beginning of the DMA’s Next Chapter

As I wrote a few months back, I recently joined the DMA’s Board of Directors and its Executive Committee to try to help the association – one of the largest and highest profile groups representing marketers – advance its agenda in a few specific ways. At the time, I noted that my interests would be on consumer advocacy and engagement, execution around interactive marketing issues and the internet community, and transparency around the organization itself.

Yesterday, John Greco, the association’s CEO, announced he is stepping down to make way for the next generation of leadership. John has done some great work the past five years running the DMA and has advanced it materially from where the association was when he took over in terms of interactive marketing, but he recognized (the hallmark of a good leader) that it was time for a change.

There are all sorts of questions people have about this announcement, and I’ve already gotten a number of calls and emails from people trying to read between the lines and get some inside scoop. Some of the questions have answers – others don’t at this stage or can’t given confidentiality agreements.

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A New Year and…Spam Still Growing

As we gear up for the New Year, it is also a good time to review the highs and lows of the past. By learning what happened in email (cut) and what changed in 2009, we have the opportunity to properly prepare for what is ahead. Last week we released a report on the 10 Top Email Trends of 2009, the complete report is available for download here.

One of the primary things we highlighted about 2009 and expect to see more of in 2010, is the continued growth of spam. Throughout 2009, we saw a flurry of articles publishing metrics on spam volumes rising and the increase of spam as a percentage of all email.

Spammers continue to have access to sophisticated tools to help them send more spam. Let’s face it, reports indicate there is a ton of money to be made from being a spammer so they won’t to just go away.

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Sender Score Footprint: Bigger is Better

As we told you just before the new year, the Return Path team has been hard at work integrating new data sources into the scoring models that power our Sender Score. The updates are live and in all, we’ve increased the size of the Sender Score footprint by 25%!

More access to unique IP data means Return Path will be able to calculate Sender Scores for even more IPs. I’m proud to report that there will be very few scenarios where we won’t be able to generate a score for an IP.

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Jump Starting Start Ups

As I mentioned in some recent posts on OnlyOnce, I’ve really enjoyed sharing the Return Path story with the tech start-up community in New York through groups like the NYC Lean Startup Meetup.

Next week I’m taking the Return Path story on the road to Silicon Valley where I’ll be presenting to Startup2Startup. Startup2Startup is a group of Silicon Valley geeks, entrepreneurs, and investors dedicated to educating and helping the next generation of Internet startups. They meet monthly over dinner to discuss relevant topics in technology and entrepreneurship, connect with new people and companies, and share our knowledge and experience.

You’ll not only get hear about Return Path’s 10 years in business but I’ll also be sharing some best practices to diagnose and resolve email deliverability problems.

Interested? Request an invitation here.

Stay tuned for more on this post-event.

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Easiest Prediction Ever: Spam Will Suck in 2010

Hey there, fellow spam fighters. Read this quick, because any second now all those infected machines that were powered down over the holidays will boot up, get fresh orders from their bot masters, and start sending spam again. Most of ‘em already have.

We’ve published a bunch of predictions recently, because that’s apparently the cool thing to do. Here are our thoughts on how those same trends (plus a few more) will affect you, the spam fighter, as you work to reduce how much unwanted crap your users see in their inboxes.

Email Still Isn’t Dead

You’ve seen the stats: Facebook and Twitter aren’t replacing email, they’re sending email. This will continue in 2010, and become more complex now that Facebook wants application developers to ask users for their email addresses in order to send them notifications them directly.

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New Postmaster Page at BlueTie

Congratulations to our partners at BlueTie for launching a new postmaster site (http://postmaster.bluetie.com). If you don’t recognize the name BlueTie, you are most likely familiar with one of their biggest domains – excite.com. BlueTie is the leading provider of hosted email and calendaring solutions for small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and service providers worldwide.

We have mentioned that many ISPs and mailbox service providers have launched postmaster sites in past posts, but what is special about this one?

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