Reporting Spam on Mobile Devices

Return Path’s new study reveals that the massive increase in email readership on mobile devices corresponds with a decrease in use of webmail, particularly on weekends. If your focus is either spam detection or list management, that’s bad news.

Tell me more

Categories: Explanation Standards View Comments

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.

Tell me more

Categories: Explanation Return Path View Comments

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?

Tell me more

Categories: Commentary View Comments

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?

Tell me more

Categories: How-To News View Comments

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 …

Tell me more

Categories: Explanation View Comments

DKIM: Not Shiny, But Very Important

When a new iPhone or Palm device is released or Google announces a new OS, everybody hears about it. These are, for a short time, the shiniest thing in the tech world. One reason for this phenomenon — perhaps the primary reason — is that they directly affect end users. They’re things that early adopters drool over and stand in line for, while slower adopters ask “Why would I want that? My 8-track player still works perfectly.” In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether domestic telecommunications companies have been engaging in “monopolistic and anticompetitive practices” again — which could have much larger, longer-lasting effects on how we access and utilize the internet in this country. But, it’s not shiny and immediate, so that gets far less attention.

Even in the email industry, shininess is rarely an accurate indication of importance or impact. Google removed the “beta” label from Gmail a few weeks ago, but Gmail is still basically the same as it was before. Spammers are mentioning Michael Jackson more often than they did before he died, but so is everyone else. And Return Path has published two more studies, proving twice again that email marketers need to pay more attention to deliverability. …

Tell me more

Categories: Explanation View Comments

Email Best Practices Matter, No Matter Who You Are

If you haven’t followed Return Path through the length of our existence you may not know that our original business was an Email Change of Address service. This is a consumer service in which we facilitated re-connection of email relationships after an individual had moved to a new email service – the email equivalent of the United States Postal Service change of address form for when you move to a new house or apartment. It’s a pretty cool idea, which is why we recently sold it to Fresh Address, who will keep it running. You should give it a try.

In the process of running the service for more than eight years we acquired over 20 million customer records. In compliance with our privacy policy as part of the sale we sent a Change of Control Notice to these customers. The notice informed our customers of the new ownership, and gave them the opportunity to opt-out of the service before the data was sent to Fresh Address.

All of the email addresses were collected using the double opt-in method, however it had been quite a while since many of these customers had been sent email from Return Path. In many cases, it had been years. Yes, not routinely mailing our customers flies in the face of good email hygiene best practices – the practices we regularly recommend to our clients. We see the irony. But the Change of Control Notice is a promise we’d made to these customers in our privacy policy, and it’s required by the law in some jurisdictions, so we had to send the email.

So now what do we do? …

Tell me more

Categories: Commentary How-To View Comments

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 …

Tell me more

Categories: Research View Comments

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. …

Tell me more

Categories: Research View Comments

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. …

Tell me more

Categories: Commentary View Comments