A New and Improved Sender Score

Today we are pleased to announce that we are launching some exciting enhancements to our Sender Score.

In 2005 when we launched the Sender Score reputation measure, it was the first-of-its-kind aimed at giving marketers real insight into how their email messages were being viewed by ISPs and other mailbox providers. Before then, reputation was largely a mystery. There were widely publicized best practices (i.e., keep complaints low, clean your list, don’t hit spam traps …) however …

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Return Path in the News

Check out some recent mentions of Return Path

Stephanie Miller discusses “What’s on the Minds of Email Marketers” about her experience leading a chat session at eM+C’s Retail Marketing Conference & Expo and exposes myths about email on DirectMag.com. Stephanie also wrote an article about …

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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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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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A new and improved Sender Score for a new year

As 2010 begins and many head to the gym to fulfill New Year’s resolutions, here at Return Path we’ll be getting our workout strengthening our data! As the world’s most comprehensive email reputation data source (collecting data from over 150 million mailboxes worldwide), we are dedicated to ensuring our reputation scores are accurate, current and thorough.

We know the email universe relies on our Sender Score. For anyone who sends email, it’s the foremost measure of email reputation – a direct reflection on sending practices based on universal reputation metrics: user complaints, spam trap hits, unknown user counts, and more. For those receiving mail, Sender Score can be used to inform inbound email handling and assist with the Herculean task of separating good email from spam.

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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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Expanding Our Global Footprint

Raymond Gannon
Business Development Manager

As we continue to grow internationally at Return Path, we have joined ETIS, the global IT Association for Telecommunications. ETIS is a European organization which brings together the major telecommunications providers in Europe to share best-practices, create benchmarking data and form discussion groups on important technology issues.

I’m excited to be a part of this group and I believe that our participation …

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Reputation Is No Longer Black and White

Comcast recently announced they are using Sender Score as a factor in determining if you are eligible to participate in their feedback loop program.

Basically, if you pass their threshold for “good” (Sender Score above 60), you’re in. If you appear below their threshold for “bad” (Sender Score below 30), you’re out. And if you are in-between (Sender Score between 30 and 60), they’ll factor in additional elements to determine your eligibility.

Reputation has evolved quite a bit in the receiver world. Not too long ago, the first reputation systems only gave binary answers. Most classified senders as bad (meaning they’d be blocked), or not bad (and thus not blocked) according to their own criteria. Others followed the model of …

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Drawing the Line: Where We Come out

In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we’ve had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in “grey” businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part — the so what.

We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here’s where we come out.

First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially “troublesome” clients: those whose businesses are illegal, or who advertise or sell illegal products; those whose businesses are involved in litigation around email, data, privacy, or security; and those whose businesses are in the grey area, or what we called in our discussions “morally hazardous.” In the end, we decided …

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Why Does Return Path Spend So Much Time Working Within Industry Organizations?

That answer is simple. Because we love email and are committed to preserving and enriching the email ecosystem for everyone who uses it (except the bad guys.) There is a lot of coordination required if senders, receivers, and end users are to withstand the assault on email by the “axis of evil” – spammers, phishers, and other fraudsters that are polluting our email ecosystem. As champions of the email space, we have dedicated a lot of time and energy into supporting the online community and committing resources to making email work for everyone.

Return Path is proud to serve in the following capacities:

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