Lacking a Common Language

Some of the terms I see floating around the industry are silly and annoying, but probably harmless. Are you really a rock star if you’ve never gyrated on stage in front of 50,000 screaming fans? Can you call yourself a ninja when you want everyone to be able to see you, or a guru when your wisdom does not lead to enlightenment?

But misunderstanding common terms can also lead to far bigger mistakes.

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Has Social Networking Surpassed Email?

As Return Path’s resident Business Analyst, I have become a bit of a geek about data graphics. A great chart can be a transformative experience that reveals new and insightful ideas. A bad experience with a chart can leave you feeling confused, misled, aggravated, betrayed, (and blogging…) Case in point: a recent edition of Silicon Alley Insider’s Chart of the Day email newsletter. It jumped out at me because …

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New MAAWG Consumer Survey: Half of Global Email Users Willingly Click on Spam

Have you ever wondered who in the world clicks on a spam email? Someone must be clicking, the thinking goes, or else spammers would have no economic incentive to keep blasting.

Turns out that we have seen the clickers, and they are us. Well, maybe not readers of this blog or employees of Return Path, but they are people like the consumers and business professionals on our marketing files and subscribed to our online services.

Nearly half (43%) of email users in North America and Western Europe say they have knowingly opened or accessed spam – including …

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MAAWG Consumer Survey: Deeper in the Data

This week, MAAWG published A Look at Consumers’ Awareness of Email Security and Practices (available from maawg.org.) This research paper is based on a survey of real email users — just like our friends, spouses, grandparents, children — the actual humans who use email and don’t want to have to understand the technical or social underpinnings. It was not a survey of MAAWG members, or conducted by MAAWG members; the intent was to get a true picture. In conversations between senders and ISPs, often with Return Path helping to facilitate, everyone’s always trying to figure out what recipients do or don’t want; finally, this survey gives us some answers.

To read the press and blog response, it sounds like they’ve concluded that spam is a complete success and everyone should start spamming to get rich — but at Return Path we rely on the data, and the data tells a much richer story than a 140-character Twitter paraphrase of the press release ever could.

First, one very humbling realization for all of us …

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Categories: Commentary Research View Comments

How Complaint Rates Correlate to Delivered Rates

In part one of this posting we learned that the Sender Score reputation rank is correlated to delivered rates. So, what about complaints? Are they correlated to delivered rates? Again, yes, there is a strong (negative) linear relationship between delivered rates and complaint rates, which can be seen in the chart below. …

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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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How Sender Score Correlates to Delivered Rates

Return Path’s Sender Score reputation rank (available at www.senderscore.org) is a measure of the reputation of mail coming from an IP address based on feedback from many ISPs and filtering companies that provide reputation data to Return Path (over 150 million mailboxes). As regular readers of this blog know, the major driver of inbox placement is reputation. But saying that is one thing – actually understanding your sending reputation is another. We created the Sender Score to give senders a number that would help them quantify their reputation to make it easier to understand and therefore easier to manage.

Does it work? We decided to do a little test to find out.

Our findings: Yes, it does work. …

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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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Inconsistencies with inbound traffic across ISPs

We encourage receiving networks to share data with us at Return Path so that we can in turn provide solutions and information that will help their filtering decisions. We believe that you can learn from another company’s mistakes and success. And, when working in a collaborative environment, receiving networks can learn from cases where one system accepted mail that another system was blocking erroneously or vice versa.

We decided to dig into our data to find out if Internet Service Providers (ISPs) treat IPs differently. We took a random sample of 400,000 IPs that attempted to send messages to four different receiving networks in early 2009. The ISPs used from our network consisted of two webmail providers, one cable operation, and a hosted business email provider.

By looking at IPs that mailed to all four networks, it became clear to us that receiving networks make extremely different decisions about how to treat those mailers. …

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Case Study: Web 2.0 Runs on Email

It’s fashionable in many circles to toll the death knell for email. Part of the reason for that is the rise of Web 2.0 – blogging, social networking, and other methods of interaction that supposedly make email obsolete.
The funny thing is, Web 2.0 tends to rely pretty heavily on email. All those LinkedIn and Facebook emails are the things that drive huge amounts of activity on the sites.

Take Twitter as another example. While Twitter has successfully created a whole new communication method (complete with the verb “to Twitter” and the noun “tweet”) a large number of their new members come through email. Specifically they come from peer-initiated email, aka forward to a friend email. Unfortunately for them, a lot of that email was being blocked or junked. This is a common problem for any company that has email forwarding on their site.

Fortunately for Twitter …

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