Another Successful MAAWG

Over the past five years, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) meetings have brought together many of the world’s experts in email spam, botnets, cybercrime, and related issues. Last week, 270 participants from more than 19 countries met in Amsterdam, in The Netherlands.

Like nearly all computer security conferences, there’s a strict policy that information shared within MAAWG is confidential — so, unlike most marketing conferences, you won’t see anyone twittering or blogging the highlights. (We got permission to post this.) A few participants reported on Facebook that there was a fascinating session about “[REDACTED]” (sic), but no other details have been made available. This difference in style shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has spent time with …

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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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Categories: Explanation Standards View Comments

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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Categories: Commentary Return Path View Comments

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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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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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? …

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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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Categories: Research View Comments

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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Where You Link Matters

Late last week, well-known investor and blogger Fred Wilson posted an article about updates to the Zemanta content recommendation tool. “Now,” Fred wrote, “if you have the Zemanta extension installed, when you go to gmail or yahoo mail, you’ll see a button that says Zemanta that lets you use the content recommendation service while composing an email.”

One of his readers, writing as BmoreWire, asked how those “pictures and recommended links affect the message’s delivery in spam filter algorithms” — so Fred asked us to weigh in. (Disclosure: Fred is an investor in both Zemanta and Return Path.)

As always, the answer is that it varies. Some spam filters pay a lot of attention to links or pictures in the message, while others mostly ignore it. The last time we studied it somewhat scientifically, link reputation impacted deliverability about 6% of the time, as compared with IP reputation at 77% and other content at 17%.

In most ISP situations, the reputation of …

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