Return Path Welcomes Christine Borgia and Todd Herr to Our Receiver Services Team

I’m very pleased to announce today that Return Path has hired Christine Borgia, formerly of AOL and Todd Herr, formerly of Time Warner Cable/Road Runner.

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Sender Score Footprint: Bigger is Better

As we told you just before the new year, the Return Path team has been hard at work integrating new data sources into the scoring models that power our Sender Score. The updates are live and in all, we’ve increased the size of the Sender Score footprint by 25%!

More access to unique IP data means Return Path will be able to calculate Sender Scores for even more IPs. I’m proud to report that there will be very few scenarios where we won’t be able to generate a score for an IP.

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A new and improved Sender Score for a new year

As 2010 begins and many head to the gym to fulfill New Year’s resolutions, here at Return Path we’ll be getting our workout strengthening our data! As the world’s most comprehensive email reputation data source (collecting data from over 150 million mailboxes worldwide), we are dedicated to ensuring our reputation scores are accurate, current and thorough.

We know the email universe relies on our Sender Score. For anyone who sends email, it’s the foremost measure of email reputation – a direct reflection on sending practices based on universal reputation metrics: user complaints, spam trap hits, unknown user counts, and more. For those receiving mail, Sender Score can be used to inform inbound email handling and assist with the Herculean task of separating good email from spam.

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Why do complaint rates vary across ISPs?

Complaint rates are a major driver of anti-spam systems. A high complaint rate (number of “this is spam” reports relative to messages in the inbox) is known to drive bad delivery rates for commercial mailers.

One of the more interesting problems that I’ve run across at Return Path is trying to figure out why complaint rates for the same IP address (or domain) vary so widely across different ISPs. Here is a scatter chart of complaint rates for ~2,500 commercial email marketing IPs across two different ISPs.  In this graph 0.05 = 5% complaint rate (5 messages per 100 places in the inbox).

What is apparent is:

1. Most IPs in this group have “lowish” complaint rates (<1%)
2. There isn’t a ton of correlation outside of that range.

So what might cause the variation in complaint rates? A partial list would include …

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If You’re Going to Read One Academic Anti-Spam Paper this Year ….

I have a difficult admission to make: I read a fair number of academic anti-spam papers.  We are constantly on the hunt for ideas that can make the reputation systems that Return Path runs a little bit better.  There are a lot of people doing some really clever stuff out there.  There are a lot of people who are sure that they have the “Final, Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem” (FUSSP) which only requires everyone to change how they handle mail.   Rarely, however, have I been as impressed with an anti-spam paper as “Spamlytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion” by a group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Diego.  More than anything, I love the audacity of their project.   

A brief summary of the project …

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Anatomy of Forged Spam

and Neil Schwartzman, Manager, Compliance and ISP Relations

We recently detected a recent spam run that used the domain of one of Return Path’s businesses – Postmaster Direct. The spammers used some of our header and footer information to make the messages look even more like legitimate mail coming from Return Path. The spam was also noted in a couple of blogs.

This sort of attack is known in the anti-spam community as a “Joe Job” – named for, literally, a guy named Joe Doll, founder of Joe’s Cyberpost, which was attacked in this way as an act of revenge some years ago.

So, let’s use this as an educational opportunity to take a look at how spam and botnets work. Let’s take a look at one example spam:

1. The sending machines appear to be compromised (meaning they were infected by a virus or Trojan horse, known more recently in the industry as “malware”): The sending IP addresses are from all over the planet. Malaysia, China, and Spain. For example, one domain appears to be …

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Why Does Return Path Spend So Much Time Working Within Industry Organizations?

That answer is simple. Because we love email and are committed to preserving and enriching the email ecosystem for everyone who uses it (except the bad guys.) There is a lot of coordination required if senders, receivers, and end users are to withstand the assault on email by the “axis of evil” – spammers, phishers, and other fraudsters that are polluting our email ecosystem. As champions of the email space, we have dedicated a lot of time and energy into supporting the online community and committing resources to making email work for everyone.

Return Path is proud to serve in the following capacities:

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AOL Changes Authentication and Whitelist Standards

We’ve recently learned some news from AOL about changes to how they authenticate inbound mail as well as changes to their whitelist program. We’ll know more after a question and answer session with AOL this afternoon (hosted by the ESPC) but here’s what we know now.

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A Belated 2007 Year in Review with a Look Ahead to 2008

We waited a little while to make sure that 2007 was really and truly over before noting the interesting trends for the year. With a fair degree of certainty we can predict that 2007 won’t return. After polling some of the smarter folks about deliverability at Return Path, here are some of the trends that we found interesting over the last year and what we think will happen in ’08.

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