97% of IP addresses worthy of blocking

Ninety-seven percent of the email senders out there have terrible reputations. They aren’t just suspect, they aren’t just a little bit bad … they are in the bottom of the barrel — scoring less than 30 according to our Sender Score Reputation Monitor. Sender Scores less than 30 are highly likely to get blocked by email receivers. Scores higher than 70 are most likely to get delivered — yet not even 1% of mailers make that cut.

So what does this mean for the average commercial emailer? Reputation is the key to inbox delivery. You need to know what your Sender Score is – think of it like your credit score for email. Then you need to ….

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Greetings from Brussels

Several times a year the anti-spam community gets together for the general meetings of the Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). It may be an outrageously bad acronym but it’s a great meeting to hear what the largest ISPs and other spam-fighters are thinking about spam and how to fight it. This summer the meeting is in Brussels. A few themes and factoids that might be interesting to marketers were clear during the conversations and presentations. These include:

– Many of the ISPs that have yet to use reputation based filtering are heading in that direction.
– There has been much less conversation about the mechanics of different authentication techniques than in past conferences. However, it doesn’t seem that …

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So, where’d they go?

As we’ve reported a couple times in the past, one of our interesting nuggets at Return Path is a wealth of “ISP switching data” that comes from our very large, active, self-reported Email Change of Address, or ECOA, service (consumer sign-up; client info).

I noted the article floating around last week that AOL lost about 1 million subscribers last quarter, the lion’s share in the U.S., of course.

So, where’d they all go?

Well, according to our ECOA data, which may of course be somewhat skewed by our data sources (but has data from well over 1 million consumers each quarter), AOL users defected as follows:

To Yahoo! — 42.5%
To broadband providers in aggregate (cable, etc.)– 23.5%
To Hotmail/MSN — 19.5%
To Gmail — 2.7%

Thanks to my colleague Iffat Ahmed for help pulling these numbers together.

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A New Season for Bonded Sender (now Sender Score Certified)

Ah, spring. New life is everywhere. Winter clothes are being put away, birds are returning from their winters in the south, flowers are blooming. We at Return Path are doing our part by announcing the “rebirth” of our Bonded Sender Program, the Internet’s largest and oldest email accreditation program, or whitelist, as Sender Score Certified.

Since we acquired Bonded Sender last fall, we’ve had the opportunity to go on a “listening tour” – talking to marketers, publishers, ESPs, ISPs, spam filtering companies, system administrators, email appliance manufacturers – you name it. What we learned was that the program was ground-breaking when it was launched in 2002 but that it needed a makeover in order to meet the challenges that have evolved around spam and deliverability for both senders and receivers during the past few years.

Our listening tour revealed that the Bonded Sender of old had four core issues that weren’t sitting well with the Internet community at large:

1. Data validity: some senders questioned the accuracy of some of the application and compliance metrics used;

2. Black box: a complete lack of transparency led many senders to be unclear as to what was driving them to fail applications or have bonds debited;

3. Bond: there isn’t a purchasing department in America that knows how to post a bond or understands why they should; and

4. Complaints: as far as ISPs were concerned, even though mailers had to pass some serious hurdles to join the program, mailers who were in the program still managed to generate too many complaints among their end users.

A spring cleaning was in order, and we had the experts to get the job done ….

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At What Price False Positives?

As has been covered in many places, including Direct and The Wall Street Journal, Verizon settled a lawsuit yesterday over “too aggressive” spam filtering, or what we in the business call false positives — filtering out legitimate, non-spam emails as spam. This is a huge problem that part of our business at Return Path, our Delivery Assurance Solutions group, has been fighting for years.

The gist of the settlement is that Verizon is changing the way it filters spam to make sure more legitimate mail gets through, and that it is refunding various small amounts of money or free months of service to customers who complained about the problem.

I am NOT a believer in lawsuits like this at all ….

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Implementing Email Authentication: A Primer

One of the most basic elements of our work at Return Path is ensuring that clients use best practices in their email delivery processes. A common recommendation we give is to implement email authentication. Email authentication has two primary benefits: It stymies forgery of email messages and allows senders to build a positive reputation with receivers based upon their mailing behavior. Yet many companies, particularly small ones, have never heard of email authentication — and those who have heard of it have not yet initiated a project to implement it.

How does email authentication work? The most common schemes today — SPF, SenderID, and DomainKeys…

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The Truth About Email Reputation

Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is; the tree is the real thing.
~Abraham Lincoln

In email, Character is Reputation. And, while reputation has become the latest buzz word in the email industry, often it is difficult for marketers to find the road to an improved reputation with so many catchphrases clouding the space. The truth is, every marketer who sends email has a reputation, whether they know it or not, whether they actively manage it or not. That reputation dictates if their email reaches the inbox.

There are no shortcuts. You can’t just publish SPF records and stop. You can’t just pay more to get unwelcome email through (at least we hope things never get to that point, despite AOL’s Goodmail announcement this week)…

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AOL and Goodmail: Two steps back for email, Part II

There’s been a lot of noise this week since the news broke about AOL and Goodmail, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to change the direction of the dialog a little bit.

First, there are two main issues here, and I think it’s healthy to separate them and address them separately. One issue is the merits of an email stamp system like the one Goodmail is proposing, relative to other methods of improving and ensuring email deliverability. The second issue — and the one that got me started earlier this week – is the question of AOL making usage of Goodmail stamps a mandatory event, replacing its enhanced whitelist. To really separate the issues, this posting will tackle the second question, and the next posting will tackle the first question.

I have reached out to Charles Stiles this morning to try to clarify AOL’s position …

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Why Email Stamps Are a Bad Idea

The introduction of the email stamp model by Goodmail is a radical departure from the current email ecosystem. While I’m all for change and believe the spam problem is still real, I don’t think stamps are the answer. Rich Gingras of Goodmail, who I have a tremedous amount of respect for, has laid out some of his arguments for this plan here in the DMNews blog. I’ll respond to those arguments as well as add some others in this posting.

It seems that Rich’s main argument in favor of stamps is that whitelists don’t work. While he clearly does understand ISPs (he used to work at one), he doesn’t seem to understand the world of publishers and marketers. His solution is fundamentally hostile to the way they do business ….

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AOL and Goodmail: Two steps back for email

Remember the old email hoax about Hillary Clinton pushing for email taxation? When we first heard AOL’s plans for Goodmail today, we thought maybe the hoax had re-surfaced and a few industry reporters got hooked by it. But alas, this tax plan seems to be true.

AOL has long held the leading standard in email whitelisting. Every email sender who cares about delivery has tried to keep their email reputation high so that they could earn placement on AOL’s coveted Enhanced Whitelist. Now, AOL may be saying that those standards don’t matter…

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