It's Client Appreciation Week at Return Path!

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

We have something big to say...

THANK YOU CLIENTS!

This week is about you! All this week everyone at Return Path is making an extra effort to recognize our clients, who are valued members of the email community.

Thank you for your positive contributions to the email universe. Thank you for your efforts to provide effective, relevant email to your customers. Thank you most of all for your partnership and willingness to allow us to show you the "path" to inbox nirvana.

Categories: News

Opportunity Knocks

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

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 ...

Categories: Email Deliverability | News

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 ...

Categories: News | Press Releases

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 ...

Categories: News

Is The Pendulum Swinging Back to Email?

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

The TechCrunch news du jour is that Jason Calacanis has stopped blogging and is instead using email to communicate with his circle.

It's interesting to note that after months (years?) of "email is dead" stories specifically around blogging, RSS feeds, and social media in general, the pendulum seems to be swinging back to email. You should read ...

Categories: News

Run, Brad, Run!

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

A few years ago we announced our support of a charity called the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (see the post about it here and learn more about Accelerated Cure here). While we have a strong culture of giving back to the community at Return Path and do that in several ways, we chose this charity as the main beneficiary of our corporate philanthropy efforts for three reasons:

1. We wanted to support research into finding a cure for MS to honor and support one of our earliest colleagues, Sophie Miller Audette who was diagnosed with MS about 5 years ago (and is still going strong as one of our key sales directors!) - and since then, two other members of the Return Path extended family have also been diagnosed with MS
2. We wanted to support an organization with a focused mission and one where our contributions could really make a difference
3. Accelerated Cure has a very entrepreneurial, innovative culture that's consistent with our own - and a solution-oriented approach to their cause that resonates with our business philosophy

Categories: News

Go West! Return Path Experts Head to Dallas

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

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. ...

Categories: News

A Flurry of CAN-SPAM Activity -- But Is It Meaningful?

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Our four-year old oft maligned anti-spam legislation in this country, the CAN-SPAM act, has seen an uptick of activity this past week. 

Melinda Krueger sums up the sentiments of many in the anti-spam community in her Email Insider column today when she says,

"There is no provision in the act against sending unsolicited email as long as you comply with the rest of the act. The motivation of the act was more to make voters feel politicians were doing something about this annoying problem."

In the last two days, however, we got news of ValueClick's $2.9 million settlement with the FTC over a CAN-SPAM violation (the largest ever), as well as notorious hardcore spammer Robert Soloway pleading guilty on a variety of charges for Really Bad Things, probably including spamming (I've read differing reports of his plea, some of which include the CAN-SPAM violation, and some of which don't).

Categories: News

Around Town: Return Path is Chatting It Up at the Tradeshows

By Anita Absey
SVP Sales & Marketing

We're painting the town red at the some of the trendiest conferences around. Will you be there too? If so, come talk shop with us. We love to talk about email. Sit in on one of our expert sessions, schedule a meeting while you are in town or just come and say 'hi". No "B" list here. Everyone is an "A" in our book. Check out where we'll be.

Categories: News

Mail Fusion

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

For 8 or 9 years now, we haven't received a single bill by U.S. mail. We use PayTrust (originally PayMyBills.com) for "online" bill pay. We have a P.O. Box somewhere in South Dakota that we've redirected all our bills to. The bills get opened, scanned, we get an email, we enter in a payment amount and date. No fuss, no muss. PayTrust even figures out which bills can be electronically delivered and provides an easy interface to set that up directly into the PayTrust account as well. I haven't received a bill or written a check in years.

Categories: News