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Goodmail alternatives

A number of Goodmail customers are scrambling to identify alternatives now that Goodmail is shutting down. There are two companies in the field offering similar services.
Return Path offers Return Path Certified. A number of large ISPs accept Return Path certification, including Yahoo, Hotmail and Comcast. IP addresses that are certified are not guaranteed to reach the inbox, but there are some delivery benefits to being certified. For instance, Hotmail lifts hourly delivery limits for certified IPs. Return Path closely monitors certified IPs and will remove certification from IP addresses that do not meet their standards. They are offering an expedited application process and managed transition to former Goodmail customers.
SuretyMail offers accreditation to senders. SpamAssassin does use SuretyMail as a factor in their scores. Mail from accredited IPs receives lower SpamAssassin scores. I don’t have much direct experience with SuretyMail, so I can’t talk too knowledgeably about their processes. A former customer has written, however, about their experience with SuretyMail. They are offering a half off application fee for former Goodmail customers.
The other option for senders is to find a good delivery consultant. As I said yesterday, a large number of senders are not certified or accredited and experience 95+% inbox delivery rates. Many of my customers, for instance, see 100% inbox without certification. There are certain market segments where certification makes a difference. But for senders who are sending mail that users actually want to receive and are engaged with, certification isn’t always necessary.

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Return Path speaks about Gmail

Melinda Plemel has a post on the Return Path blog discussing delivery to Gmail.

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I do not think that means what you think it means

Yesterday, I looked at the analysis of ESP delivery done by Mr. Geake. Today we’ll look at some of his conclusions.
“Being blacklisted most likely suggests that sender IP either sends out to a great deal of unknown or angry recipients.” That’s not how most blocklists work. Most blocklists are driven by spam traps or by the personal mailboxes of the list maintainers. The only blocklist that took requests from the public was the old MAPS RBL, and I don’t believe that is the case any longer.
Blocking at ISPs is often a sign of sending out a lot of mail to unknown or angry / unengaged recipients. But most ISPs don’t make their lists public. Some allow anyone to look up IP addresses, and if we had the IPs we could check. But we don’t, so we can’t.
“[…] if you share this IP with Phones4U then only 62% of your emails will be accepted by a recipient’s email server. That’s before they hit the junk filter. I wouldn’t want to pay for that.” This conclusion relies on the Sender Score “accepted rate” number. Accepted Rate is a figure I don’t rely on for much. I’ve never been able to reconcile this number with what client logs tell me about accepted rate. For instance, I have one IP address that has a 4.4% acceptance rate. But I know that 19 out of 20 emails from this IP do not bounce. In fact, it’s rare to see any mail from this IP bounce.
The one thing that Mr. Geake gets right, in all of this, is that if you’re on a shared IP address with a poor sender, then you share that sender’s reputation. Their reputation can hurt your delivery.
But a dedicated IP isn’t always your best bet, either.  Smaller senders may not have the volume or frequency required to develop and keep a good reputation on an static IP. In these cases, sharing an IP address with similar senders may actually increase delivery.
For some senders outsourcing the email expertise is a better use of resources than dedicating a person to managing email delivery. For other senders, bringing mail in house and investing in staff to manage email marketing is better.
Tomorrow: how do you really evaluate an ESP?

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