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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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Comcast Inboxes

Comcast is the largest cable provider in the United States with 22 million subscribers comprising 32 million active mailboxes. Their email user base is made up of paid subscribers to their Internet service. Comcast provides a reliable email service with lots of storage. Unlike other North American cable providers, Comcast has invested significantly in their email service which includes a snappy Zimbra-based web interface.

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How Two Email Gods and a Goddess Could Create a Golden Age for Email

If we really could have super powers to make the email universe a better place, what would those be and how would we use them?

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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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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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“Delivered” Depends On Context

When an email sending system reports that a message has been ‘delivered,’ that may not be an accurate portrayal of the final destination of the message. To understand why that is, and why ‘delivered’ has been the term of art for so long, we just need to look at the email delivery process.

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Lacking a Common Language

Human communication takes many forms, from the dense poetry of Shakespeare’s plays to the rigorous precision of IETF documents to the false apologies conveyed by emoticons. Metaphors seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread, while verbal puns can creep up on the unwary like a faux queue in arrears. But at the end of the day, when all is said and done, like a bull in a china shop, inaccurate cliches and colloquialisms can actually impede communication — particularly technical communication.

Some of the terms I see floating around the industry are silly and annoying, but …

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See, We Told You Email Isn't Dead

When people at email companies write articles titled “Email Isn’t Dead, We Swear!” it’s hard not to be suspicious. Clearly we’ve got some skin in this game. Nevertheless, I wrote my column for MediaPost last week on why I believe email is still the killer app. I was careful to include data to back up my argument so that it’s not just about my opinion. And so I’m delighted to see more great data that confirms what we know …

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Happy Birthday, Internet!

Oh, Internet. You had such potential when you were born — darling of the research community, supported by the wealthiest military the world has ever known. And you married well, into a powerful merchant family. Why are you so lost? Is it a midlife crisis?

You were born, some say, 40 years ago this week in a lab at UCLA — one of ARPA‘s many children. It wasn’t until nearly two months later that you first spoke, transmitting the letters “L” and “O” before crashing — but soon you were growing, expanding into research facilities all over the continent, and eventually (with some delays) the world.

In 1972 you moved from computing theory into the world of human communication when Ray Tomlinson gave you electronic mail. Ray said that “the first message of any substance was a message announcing the availability of network email.” From those first few, feeble test messages and system announcements to today’s daily billions — it’s hard to imagine, now, that there was ever a time when you didn’t carry email!

In the 1980s you were made up of mere hundreds of computers across a few dozen individual networks, each distinct — yet each inter-networked. It was in those intersections that you truly grew up. You were given the Domain Name System (DNS) to ease finding your various parts, and nicknamed “cyberspace” after science fiction author William Gibson coined the term to describe something you still might some day become.

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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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