Changes to AOL Bounce Processing

Last week AOL announced on its postmaster blog changes to the way it will be handling mailer daemon errors.

What does this mean for large-volume email senders? You should expect to see a change in the From: address, as well as the number of asynchronous bounces you receive from AOL. Asynchronous bounces occur after the SMTP conversation, which means that the ISP accepts the senders’ email first and then rejects it later. As a result, the bounce notifications trickle in minutes to days after the initial send in the form of an email. This is different from …

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DKIM: Not Shiny, But Very Important

When a new iPhone or Palm device is released or Google announces a new OS, everybody hears about it. These are, for a short time, the shiniest thing in the tech world. One reason for this phenomenon — perhaps the primary reason — is that they directly affect end users. They’re things that early adopters drool over and stand in line for, while slower adopters ask “Why would I want that? My 8-track player still works perfectly.” In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether domestic telecommunications companies have been engaging in “monopolistic and anticompetitive practices” again — which could have much larger, longer-lasting effects on how we access and utilize the internet in this country. But, it’s not shiny and immediate, so that gets far less attention.

Even in the email industry, shininess is rarely an accurate indication of importance or impact. Google removed the “beta” label from Gmail a few weeks ago, but Gmail is still basically the same as it was before. Spammers are mentioning Michael Jackson more often than they did before he died, but so is everyone else. And Return Path has published two more studies, proving twice again that email marketers need to pay more attention to deliverability. …

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How I Spent My Early Summer: 7 Learnings from the OMS Tour

I spent much of May and June on the road in eight cities with the Online Marketing Summit Whistle Stop tour. It was great to get out and meet with so many smart digital marketers.

Here are seven observations/trends:

1. Email rocks. It’s still a very important part of the online marketing mix. In fact, email this year has been elevated to a sort of celebrity status. Lots of executive attention due to the low cost and high return. It’s the biggest revenue driver in the toolkit.

2. No amount of celebrity can trump the realities of lean budgets. Marketing budgets do not seem to be growing, but the investment continues to be strong with email and search, where the immediate revenue and return is. For email, there isn’t so much innovation as preservation: Preserving our jobs and our team, growing our database assets, tying the various eCRM elements together (even loosely) and maintaining our list hygiene and deliverability budgets. …

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How Sender Score Correlates to Delivered Rates

Return Path’s Sender Score reputation rank (available at www.senderscore.org) is a measure of the reputation of mail coming from an IP address based on feedback from many ISPs and filtering companies that provide reputation data to Return Path (over 150 million mailboxes). As regular readers of this blog know, the major driver of inbox placement is reputation. But saying that is one thing – actually understanding your sending reputation is another. We created the Sender Score to give senders a number that would help them quantify their reputation to make it easier to understand and therefore easier to manage.

Does it work? We decided to do a little test to find out.

Our findings: Yes, it does work. …

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Recession Buster Ideas for Email

The news these days from Wall Street and the Halls of Congress could not be worse for marketers already worried about the recession and consumer and business spending in Q4.

Can email help? I think so. In fact, I think now’s the time to prime your email program into a powerful revenue channel, before the news gets worse. Come on, we were the “killer app” of Web 1.0. It’s well past time we proved our worth in the Web 2.0 marketing mix

Here are three ideas to test now – and use the data to build your program success for Q4 and into 2009. If email doesn’t contribute more now, then we can’t expect to remain at the center of the marketing mix, or budget.

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Eighty Percent of Email is Being Sent From Illegitimate or Unknown Mail Servers According To Return Path’s Reputation Benchmark Report

Commercial Mailers With Low Unknown User Rates and No Spam Trap Hits Have Delivery Rate Increases of More Than 20 Points

NEW YORK & DENVER–Eighty percent of email is being sent from illegitimate or unknown mail servers, Return Path discovered with its new Return Path Reputation Benchmark Report. Return Path found that forty-six percent of email is being sent from hosts that should not be sending email at all – compromised hosts, dynamic IP addresses, and other non-mail servers. In addition, 34% of email is sent from “unknown” IPs which are not classifiable by available data.

Return Path conducted the Reputation Benchmark study by examining a sample of 2.3 million IPs pulled from the Return Path Reputation Data Network – a cooperative data network that collects and analyzes email data from more than 20 ISPs and other data providers representing more than 100 million mailboxes.

For the study, Return Path removed the data from servers that do not have reverse DNS and are clearly not supposed to be sending email. If you factor in the 35% of servers with no reverse DNS, the “bad” mail hosts goes even higher …

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AOL Feedback Loop Gets a Makeover

Four years ago, a small group of email technology experts – from AOL, Yahoo!, the open source community, and other places – got together to solve what seemed to be a simple problem: feedback loops, such as AOL’s, were not standardized and often difficult to parse. The result was a draft standard called the Abuse Reporting Format, or ARF, which has been adopted by nearly every ISP that has created a feedback loop since then – including Comcast and other feedback loops hosted by Return Path. (It’s called a “draft standard” because the document has not yet gone through the IETF’s full standards process. Few changes are expected as that process continues.)

Once this specification was stable, AOL began to offer an ARF option for those feedback recipients who were ready for it. Being generally nice folks, however, they continued to offer the old format.
But now, AOL has announced on their postmaster blog that they will be offering Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) as the only format for Feedback Loop (FBL) reports. Beginning on September 2, 2008, AOL will remove all non-ARF FBLs. They will also convert all existing non-ARF FBLs to ARF. …

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Court Affirms Comcast's Right to Keep Inboxes Safe from Spam

This week the industry is, once again, abuzz with talk of the e360 lawsuit against Comcast. e360 was attempting to use the federal courts to force Comcast to accept unwanted mail, and the judge has ruled on the case. As email technology guru John Levine wrote on Friday morning, “it’s a fun read.”

Here at Return Path, I read Judge Zagel’s order twice: first from an anti-spam perspective, and then again thinking about how it might affect our clients. Some marketers will surely find reasons to fear this judgement – but they shouldn’t. This is good for them, too – because by protecting the ISPs’ good-faith efforts to protect their users from objectionable email, Judge Zagel is protecting the inbox against the really bad stuff. Inboxes that are filled with scams, spams, and things that look like they might be scams or spams, are simply unusable. The only way for people to be able to find, read, and respond to the messages they want to receive is for the inbox to be free of the junk they don’t want to receive.

Marketers who follow best practices, who respect their subscribers, and who (to put it simply) follow all the other advice we give, can and should continue to do what you’ve been doing. You’ll get to the inbox, just like today. …

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JupiterResearch: Marketers Focus on the Wrong Stuff?

As many readers of this blog will no doubt already know, the JupiterResearch report on ESPs that was released this month found that 70% of marketers rank “deliverability” as their number one priority when selecting an email service provider. While we applaud marketer’s attention to deliverability issues, it seems to us that their focus has been placed slightly in the wrong direction. As I’ve written before, ESPs cannot solve all deliverability problems for email marketers. Moreover, there is very little difference between the major players on the pieces that the ESP can control. Basically, you can stop worrying about whether or not your ESP can get the email through. They do a good job.

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Worried About Deliverability? Focus on Relevance

Whenever I sit down to write about relevance, I find myself thinking “Is this a new idea? Don’t marketers already know this? They must get the basics by now, right?”

Unfortunately, the answer appears to be a resounding “No!” Last week JupiterResearch released its 2008 Email Marketer’s Buyers Guide and, as Direct Magazine columnist Ken Magill points out, the news isn’t very good. The top criteria marketers use when choosing an ESP are deliverability and price. That is good news – as deliverability is the single most contributing factor to earning higher revenue. And keeping costs down also helps the bottom line.

However, as the report itself points out, looking to your ESP to solve your deliverability is completely misplaced.

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