Yahoo! Adds Two New Email Domains

Yahoo! announced last Thursday that it is making two new domains available for email – ymail.com and rocketmail.com. They introduced the new domains to make it possible for new people …

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Return Path is Headed to MAAWG

Return Path is heading to the historic town of Heidelberg, Germany this week for MAAWG’s 13th General Meeting.

Look for our deliverability rock stars, George Bilbrey and J.D. Falk, moderating panels, answering questions and participating throughout the conference.

And, be sure to enjoy …

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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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Drawing the Line: Your Thoughts

A few years back when we launched our blog, we disabled the comments feature because we got far too much spam and far too little actual conversation. Boy am I sorry for that! My post last week, Drawing the Line, drew a number of insightful comments by email. With the permission of those readers I’m going to share some of those comments here. (Meanwhile, a mirror post on my personal blog, OnlyOnce, drew a few public comments with similar themes.) Look for a third post in a few days which outlines where we come out on the debate.

The overwhelming consensus was that we should not treat legal businesses in “sin” industries any different than any other business. This position was articulated best by Dean F. Sutherland who wrote: “Stick to email practices and legality. Leave questions of morality to the private decisions of private folks. After all, one man’s morality is another man’s bad joke… and vice versa.”

In fact, writer Thomas Kellar cited automobiles, insurance and pharmaceuticals, among others, as industries that might also be considered sinful. He, along with a few other writers, objected to the inclusion of guns on our list, which are protected by the Second Amendment.

Ed Levinson posed the question …

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Go West! Return Path Experts Head to Dallas

Last week I wrote about Return Path’s Email Expert Seminar heading to Denver, Colorado. Well, in that same week we are also making a stop in Dallas, Texas.

The agenda for both seminars has been created to be super-informative and ultra-interactive. First, you will hear from our own email experts – Stephanie Miller, George Bilbrey and Bonnie Malone Fry – as they give you the lowdown on email reputation, subscriber experience and acquisition strategies. We then move into roundtables where you’ll get to ask our experts the questions that keep you up at night. Our experts, along with your colleagues at the table, will help you think through new tactics to achieve your email marketing goals.

We’ve also lined up two great speakers in Dallas. …

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The Comcast Feedback Loop is Available Exclusively from Return Path

We are very pleased to announce that Comcast now offers a complaint feedback loop, powered by Return Path. (For you deliverability nerds, you might note that we got beaten on this announcement by our friends at Deliverability.com. We appreciate the plug!)

Those of us who work in the industry feel like everyone should, by now, grok what a feedback loop is and why it’s so useful for both senders and end recipients of email. But we know that’s not completely true yet, so this seems like a good time to review the history and initial purpose of feedback loops.

When a user clicks the “report spam” button (or equivalent) in their mail client, a copy of that message (a spam “complaint”) is transmitted to their ISP. This type of system is generally only used by web-based mail clients such as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, or in custom desktop interfaces such as AOL’s, though some anti-spam vendors offer plug-ins for Outlook or Thunderbird. The ISP can use these reports, in aggregate, to update and improve their spam filters. …

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Drawing the Line

We are having a bit of a debate at the moment internally around our Sender Score deliverability business about how to handle clients who are in businesses that are, shall we say, not exactly as pure as the driven snow.  As a company that provides software and services to businesses without a vertical focus, we are often approached by all sorts of companies wanting our services where we don’t love what they do.  Examples include:

• Gambling
• Tobacco
• Neutriceuticals
• Guns
• Adult content or products

Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different.  But common threads run through all three dimensions. 

…

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Partner Case Study: Deliverability Win at Blue Sky Factory

Kudos to our friends over at Blue Sky Factory. They have been using our Sender Score suite of tools for their clients for some time now, and they are starting to see some real results. In fact, they just published a case study of their work with Caribbean Tours & Cruises.

Travel marketing can be tricky in the age of spam. Many of the words they would normally use in their content gets flagged by filters. The use of images – crucially important in making recipients long for that beach getaway – can get blocked and make emails unreadable. …

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Rocky Mountain High

Last month we took our best email experts and hit the road to bring fresh, new marketing ideas to San Francisco and Los Angeles. This month we embark on the next leg of the tour.

Next stop is the Mile High City on May 27. Not only will you learn best practices from our expert team of Return Pathers, but you will get first hand knowledge and advice from other email marketers just like you. On tap for Denver, are email marketers from Memolink, Shop at Home, Sierra Trading Post and LifePics who will share their experiences on how they cope with everyday email challenges to drive revenue for their businesses. Best of all, it’s a great opportunity for you to get your specific questions answered one-on-one during our email expert roundtables.

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Counting the Loose Change

Our good client Andrew Magpantay, Senior Product Manager at Reunion.com, coined a great expression when he spoke at our client seminar in Los Angeles on Thursday. He said that reconnecting with non-responders on the file is like gathering up the “loose change.” Sure, there is some value there, and if you have a lot of it lying around it adds up to real dollars, but the risk is that complaints rates are higher from these subscribers and there is a risk of spam traps from old addresses. To extend his analogy, the trick is to figure out if it’s worth the work to overturn the couch for a few dollars.

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