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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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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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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A Deluge is Underway; is Email Waterproof?

What’s that we see, waving through the raindrops? Isn’t email supposed to be dead? You already know I’m going to say no; as usual, once you see past the refraction and the rainbows, reality is somewhat more complicated.

The recent, ongoing launch of Google Wave has almost everything we’ve come to expect. It begins with a slow roll-out, with people begging for invitations. Then comes the headlines proclaiming the death of email, often based on nothing more than a short preview video and someone else’s interview with Wave’s creators. This all leads to gigantic, Google-sized expectations. But with Wave those expectations have yet to be met; It is either such a gigantic paradigm shift that most of us can’t yet comprehend the enormity of their genius, or it’s an incomplete product that shouldn’t have launched until there was something more to show off than a Google-y user interface. Either way, Wave appears to have crested quickly, and we’re left waiting and wondering.

Then the Mozilla Thunderbird team filled that void by introducing a new concept they call Raindrop. …

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Wait, what do you do?

I was recently at a big family reunion where I caught up with many relatives, some that I had not seen in more than twenty years. Of course one of the first couple of questions I was asked was what I do for a living. Well, it’s easy to answer that question to people that work in the industry, but to the rest of the world it can be tricky.

Four years ago, when I began working with Return Path, I would describe the company by saying, “We are an email services company. We help businesses get their email delivered to people that want it, and help internet service providers better understand who is a good sender and who isn’t”.

The conversation would continue as follows: …

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Social Networking and Email

Social networks have exploded on the scene and continue to grow rapidly. However, their reputation in the industry has been mixed. Often, in their viral marketing efforts to reach more users, some social networks have crossed the line by participating in shady permission practices: spamming users’ address books and encouraging their users to invite friends of friends of friends to join.

Now, several large social networks are rumored to soon be providing email service. It will be interesting to see …

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Drawing the Line: Where We Come out

In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we’ve had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in “grey” businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part — the so what.

We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here’s where we come out.

First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially “troublesome” clients: those whose businesses are illegal, or who advertise or sell illegal products; those whose businesses are involved in litigation around email, data, privacy, or security; and those whose businesses are in the grey area, or what we called in our discussions “morally hazardous.” In the end, we decided …

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Trust in Email Begins with Authentication

Unfortunately, forging From: or other commonly seen email headers is trivially easy. It’s one of the most frustrating oversights in the creation of internet email technology — though of course that’s only obvious in hindsight; it was just fine for the pre-internet networks of the late 1970s and early-mid 1980s.

Since then, things have changed — and the most interesting recent technological advancements in email have been in the realm of sender authentication, which encompasses ways to verify that the apparent sender of a message actually is the entity which sent it. Before you can answer the question “can I trust this message?,” you first have to ask “who sent it?” — but before authentication, there was often no way to know for sure.

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