Email Deliverability Still Plagues Commercial Email Senders Worldwide: Only 81% of Email Reaches the Inbox

Return Path, the world’s leading email certification and reputation monitoring company, today announced the findings from its “Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, 1H 2011.” The findings of the report indicate that email deliverability still plagues commercial email senders worldwide with only 81% of all permissioned email making it to the inbox. Globally, one out of every five emails or 7% land either in a spam or junk folder and 12% simply go missing—blocked by ISP-level filtering. While deliverability rates vary by each region, Return Path research points to three key factors: belief in the “bounce rate myth,” lack of financial accountability for deliverability failures and resistance to implementing best practices. The report also looks at B2B issues and the impact new filtering applications have on Inbox placement.

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Categories: Press Releases Research Return Path View Comments

50 Per Cent More Marketing Emails Considered Spam By ISPs

Marketers’ continued poor practices result in their emails being increasingly blocked and consigned to spam folders Email marketers’ lack of best practice forced a near 50 per cent jump in emails not being delivered to the inboxes of UK customers …

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Categories: Press Releases Return Path View Comments

Bulking at Gmail and Hotmail

Some of our clients have recently inquired about increased bulking at Gmail and Hotmail. Additionally, senders and ESPs throughout the email marketing industry have noticed an increase in bulking at Gmail and bulking and deferrals at Hotmail.

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Enhanced Return Path Deliverability Monitoring Suite Empowers Email Marketers with In-Depth Inbox Intelligence

Return Path, the world’s leading email certification and reputation monitoring company, today announced the newest release of its Deliverability Monitoring Suite, designed to provide marketers with critical inbox intelligence.

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Categories: Press Releases Return Path View Comments

The Case of the Missing AOL Mail Server: Four Steps for Marketers

Blame it on the first total lunar eclipse and winter solstice in 400 years, but AOL’s MX servers mysteriously went missing for approximately four hours after midnight. You’ve probably already read my colleague JD Falk’s article on this exact topic already which also provides a fantastic technical primer of MX records and how they operate. What this all means to you as the marketer or sender is that when attempting to deliver mail to an AOL address, your mail server couldn’t find the AOL mail server record, and potentially never successfully delivered mail to your recipients. An MX record is short for Mail eXchange record and it tells your mail server where to connect and send mail through in order to reach your intended recipients. However if an MX record is missing, the sending mail server will receive an error that says something to the effect of “sorry, I couldn’t find any host by that name” or “name or service not known.” In short, your mail couldn’t be delivered. In AOL’s case, the MX record was missing for almost 4 hours (12AM – 4AM EST) which means if you tried to deliver mail during that time to AOL, you weren’t able to. Here are four things to check…

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Report from the UK: 4 Email Tips Guaranteed to Stuff Your Stocking

With another Royal Mail strike looming just as the busy shopping season gears up, it’s understandable for retailers in the United Kingdom to be in a bit of a panic. Having signed off months ago on glossy Christmas catalogues, marketing managers will be left wondering when customers will actually see the results of their hard work (and high printing costs). Will they remain in postal sorting limbo, will they ever be delivered and when? Online retailers will be worried as well: consumers are going to be less inclined to shop online if they can’t have a guaranteed shipping or delivery date for their items.

As if this year wasn’t hard enough on businesses trying to keep a positive balance sheet and stay upbeat amidst the dire financial and economic predictions, now this. So what’s a retailer to do? Where can a retail marketer turn during a quarter so crucial to the company’s bottom line? The answer is email. Now, more than ever. Here are three ideas for surviving, and thriving, the Christmas crunch …

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Fight or Flight? Dealing With Marketing Stress

Whether or not you believe we are in or heading to a recession, you most likely believe we are in times of uncertainty. If you are like the many clients I have talked to over the past few months, your budget has been frozen or cut. You still have goals to meet and now you need to meet them with fewer funds. This is not a fun or easy place for you to be in. The question is how will you react to this marketing stress. Will you fight or flee?

I hope everyone reading this chooses to fight. I hope you choose to make your own luck rather than waiting for luck to find you. I hope you choose to find a way to make more with less. These times of uncertainty are times of opportunity. An opportunity for you to shine. An opportunity for your business to not only exist, but grow.

If you are still reading, you chose to fight. Good for you! In order to fight and move forward …

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Opportunity Knocks

When our friends at Habeas announced that they were exploring a sale of the company a few months back, we were intrigued. While fiercely competing in the marketplace does create some degree of tension or even mistrust between two companies, that activity also creates a lot of common ground for discussion about the market and the future.

So we are very excited today to announce that we are acquiring Habeas in a deal that is signed and should close within a couple weeks. Cutting through all the PR platitudes, here’s what this deal really means for our stakeholders:

For everyone we work with, this deal means we have even more scale. More scale is a good thing. It means we can invest more in our future in everything from technical infrastructure, to product innovation, to globalization, to employee development. It’s easy to be great when you’re a 25 person company. It’s actually quite challenging when you’re a 50-100 person company. It becomes easier again, though in different ways, when you are a 200 person company with more resources.

For ISPs and filters, more scale means more and better data products to help fine tune filtering algorithms and improve member experience. It also means an even more streamlined way to reach masses of marketers and publishers.

For sender clients, we can now offer …

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Return Path to Acquire Habeas, Creates New Powerhouse for Trusted Email Delivery

Combined Scope, Scale, Expertise to Address Hot Demand for Email in Direct Marketing, Mobile and Web 2.0 Applications

New York, NY, and Mountain View, CA -August 12, 2008- Two of the pioneers in email reputation management and deliverability services today joined forces to create a new company that can better address the needs of senders, receivers and consumers to ensure trusted email delivery despite growing online threats. Return Path, Inc., the largest email deliverability service provider, will acquire its closely held competitor, Habeas, Inc. The agreement creates a new, integrated email reputation management and deliverability services provider delivering a variety of comprehensive services to more than 1,500 clients globally.

Despite the hype around newer technologies, email continues to thrive as the most pervasive of all business communications tools. According to a May 2008 study by research firm Ipsos, more than 67 percent of consumers prefer email over other online vehicles and 65 percent believe this will continue to be the case in five years.

“Email is by far the most relied upon channel for business communications, and today’s news will help ensure the vitality of email for many years to come,” said Matt Blumberg, Chairman & CEO of Return Path. “Return Path pioneered email deliverability five years ago …

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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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