Major Telecommunications Providers Cooperate to Stop Spam in Europe

Using the Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) and Return Path’s feedback report processing technology, ETIS members help each other find the spammers lurking within each others’ networks — and their customers’ networks, and their customers’ networks.

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Is Amazon Playing Chicken With Mailbox Providers?

The market for an easy outbound mail API “in the cloud” may well be gigantic; it’s pretty obvious that email is the last thing that the latest social/cloud/whatever startup entrepreneur wants to think about. When the next hot site discovers that deliverability isn’t ever guaranteed, will they blame Amazon, or will they blame the mailbox provider who rejected the message?

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You Can Stop the Backscatter

Backscatter occurs when your mail server unintentionally sends auto-generated replies to recipients who didn’t send the email in the first place. Confused? Wait, there’s more.

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How to Evaluate & Compare Anti-Spam Products

Hey, you! Yeah, you with the ethernet cable. Get in here and look at all this spam. What do you mean you can’t do anything?! Didn’t we buy one of those anti-spam thingers in 2002? Oh fine, I’ll approve an upgrade, but you can only choose one thing — make sure it’s the best. Otherwise, you’re fired. What was your name again?

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Prioritization of Spam at Gmail

UPDATE: The original version of this post had a link to the main Google YouTube channel, which had featured the spam video. After we published this, they swapped in a new video, causing confusion for some readers. We’ve now updated the link to go directly to the video about Gmail spam priorization. Sorry for any confusion we caused.

Google’s Gmail can be somewhat of a mystery. They do things a bit differently than other large ISPs and they do it well. From our perspective in deliverability, Gmail is always a tougher ISP to understand and troubleshoot.

Most of the experts know that Gmail relies heavily on their user feedback and “this is spam” vs. “this is not spam” voting, but many questions remained around how they really prioritize complaints. Recently, they posted a video to YouTube that helps us understand just a little more and pull back a bit more of the mystery.

Google’s Matt Cutts says Google does order complaints, and that typically, they try to think about what the impact is on the user. So, if they get …

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Delivered May Not Mean To the Inbox

It’s no surprise that email marketers are often confused about the difference between a bounce rate and an inbox deliverability rate. Most email broadcast systems in the U.S. and Europe report something called “delivered.” It’s usually a pretty high number – like 98% or 93%. And your ESP would like you to judge them on that number, because it’s really high, and it’s easy for them to be confident that it will stay high.

The problem is that most vendors define “delivered” as the inverse of your bounce rate – the number of records on your file that either no longer exist (a hard bounce) or are having temporary delivery failure (a soft bounce), perhaps due to an out of office reply or a full mailbox or some glitch in the ISP server.

Most marketers who keep their lists clean and have good permission practices have a bounce rate of 1%-5%. Even if you outsource your bounce handling to your ESP, you are still responsible for how they manage the removal of names – so be sure you understand what they are doing on your behalf. Your bounce rate is a good number to have included in your reports. It tells you something about your list hygiene. But it tells you nothing about what happens to your emails. …

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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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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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Fighting Spam in the New Economy

Happy New Year! Every January I take some time to reflect on recent industry trends and make some predictions and goals for the coming year. Needless to say, 2008 economic events have made a strong impact all around the globe. The anti-spam community, like many others, is bracing and already seeing the impact.

When times are tough, more people turn to crime. In the email business, this means spam and spam efforts will continue to increase. This includes pure evil spammers, who will redouble-efforts to get their annoying spam-messages in your inbox as well as semi-legitimate marketers, feeling the pinch of the economy, who will be tempted to be overly aggressive with their marketing campaigns and whose emails will cross the line from welcomed to unwelcomed and/or “spam”. The folks who are caught in the crosshairs of this issue are the ISPs and the email administrators – trying to sort through this increasing tide of junk mail while also being asked to make budget cuts.

That’s why I’m calling 2009 “The Year of Collaboration” among the ISP community. …

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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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