Remembering J.D.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write in 12 years as Return Path’s CEO. I hope it never has an equal.

One of our long-time employees, J.D. Falk, passed away today after a year-long struggle with cancer. J.D., which most people don’t know was short for Jesse David, was only 37 years old. Although I cannot claim to be a close friend of J.D.’s, I have known him fairly well in the industry going back about eight years, and he has been a trusted member of our team here for the last four+ years.

J.D. did great work for us at Return Path, but my admiration for him goes beyond that.

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Phishing Attack: An Open Letter to the Anti-Spam and Mailbox Operator Community

By Matt Blumberg CEO & Chairman I’m sure many of you are familiar with the targeted ESP phishing attack that has been ongoing for almost a year now and has led to multiple known ESP system breaches. Return Path was …

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Security Alert: Phishing Attack Update

Yesterday, we updated on our report around the targeted ESP phishing attack that has been ongoing for almost a year now and has led to multiple known ESP system breaches. Our original post is here, and yesterday’s post is here. …

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Security Alert: Update on ESP Phishing Attack

As you saw from our blog post yesterday, we have become aware of a serious phishing attack aimed in part specifically at ESPs, some direct mailers, and other sites. Since the time of our posting and into late evening yesterday …

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Why CEOs Shouldn’t Mess with Engineers

The ship set sail in 1628 as the pride of the Swedish navy during a war with Poland. It was the pride of King Gustavus Adolphus II, who took a keen personal interest in it. But the ship sank literally minutes after setting sail.

How could that be? While the king was quick to blame the architect and shipbuilder, later forensics proved both to be mostly blameless.

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The Greatest Minds in Email

I recently returned from a six-week sabbatical. It was fantastic. I blogged about it on my personal blog if you’re curious about the experience. It turned out that, while I was gone, we had probably the most successful, least dramatic six weeks in our 10 year history. I had assumed that’s because the team buckled down while I was out, and so did our Board.

Little did we know what really happened during that six week stretch. It’s often said that when the cat’s away, the mice play. The short video below is what greeted me today at an all-hands meeting.

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Phishin’ Gone: Return Path Launches a New Product to Protect Consumers and Brands from Fraudulent Emails

Today Return Path is announcing the launch of a new product aimed at fighting phishing emails. Domain Assurance includes an audit and a registry to help brands properly authenticate all of the email and allow ISPs to confidently block unauthenticated email. The service leverages Return Path’s relationships with more than 130 of top ISPs around the world and will launch with the participation of Yahoo!, Comcast, Cloudmark and Tucows.

Phishing messages are extremely dangerous, as they often contain links that lead to malware and viruses that can access private accounts and steal valuable personal data. These emails have a corrosive effect on brands as consumers become wary of any email from often-spoofed domains. …

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2010 Email Predictions: Good News for the Good Guys and More Mischief from the Bad Guys

As we embark on a new year and a new decade (and Return Path’s second decade in business), I’m back with my annual predictions for the email industry. My 2009 good news-bad news predictions were somewhat prescient but certainly not my best effort. So, after considerable thought and a fair amount of internal debate, here’s what I’ve got:

1) ISPs will focus more of their anti-spam efforts around picking out the good guys rather than blocking the bad guys. Why? There are just so many more bad guys – and we’ve reached a tipping point where it is faster and cheaper to cherry pick the good senders. Along with their internal tools, we’ll see more ISPs rely on 3rd party white lists like Return Path Certification for more accurate filtering.

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Where You Link Matters

Late last week, well-known investor and blogger Fred Wilson posted an article about updates to the Zemanta content recommendation tool. “Now,” Fred wrote, “if you have the Zemanta extension installed, when you go to gmail or yahoo mail, you’ll see a button that says Zemanta that lets you use the content recommendation service while composing an email.”

One of his readers, writing as BmoreWire, asked how those “pictures and recommended links affect the message’s delivery in spam filter algorithms” — so Fred asked us to weigh in. (Disclosure: Fred is an investor in both Zemanta and Return Path.)

As always, the answer is that it varies. Some spam filters pay a lot of attention to links or pictures in the message, while others mostly ignore it. The last time we studied it somewhat scientifically, link reputation impacted deliverability about 6% of the time, as compared with IP reputation at 77% and other content at 17%.

In most ISP situations, the reputation of …

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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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