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Links: September 24, 2012

Last week Return Path announce a new set of email intelligence products. One of their new products offers customers the chance to actually see how (some subset of) their customer base interacts with mail directly. It moves beyond simply looking at probe mailboxes and actually looks inside the mailbox of recipients.
Spamhaus has listed bit.ly on the Domain Blocklist (DBL) for allowing spammers to abuse their redirector service. Spammers have been abusing bit.ly for a while, and I’m a little surprised it’s taken so long for a listing to happen. Steve wrote a post last year about URL redirectors and offered suggestions on what to do to avoid blocking problems when using a URL shortening service.
Real Insights has a very interesting post on why it should be “hard” to subscribe to your mailing list. There are also a number of good suggestions about the subscription process itself. Definitely worth a read.

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Delivery challenges increasing

Return Path published their most recent Global Deliverability report this morning. (Get the Report) This shows that inbox placement of mail has decreased 6% in the second half of 2011. This decrease is the largest decrease Return Path has seen in their years of doing this report.
To be honest, I’m not surprised at the decrease. Filters are getting more sophisticated. This means they’re not relying on simply IP reputation for inbox delivery any longer. IP reputation gets mail through the SMTP transaction, but after that mail is subject to content filters. Those content filters are getting a lot better at sorting out “wanted” from “unwanted” mail.
I’m also hearing a lot of anecdotal reports that bulk folder placements at a couple large ISPs increased in the first quarter of 2012. This is after the RP study was finished, and tells me increased bulk folder placement is more likely to be a trend and not a blip.
One of the other interesting things from the RP study is that the differences are not across all mail streams, but are concentrated in certain streams and they vary across different regions.

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Return Path partners with Symantec

Today Return Path announced a partnership with Symantec to improve their anti-phishing product. Return Path is incorporating the Symantec Trusted Domain List into their authentication and filtering product to help customers protect their brands. Press Release
Phishing scams affect everyone, and having a brand that is used in phishing can reduce consumer trust in that brand. Protecting brands in email has been one of the more difficult challenges facing the email community. With the adoption of DKIM and DMARC by major brands and ISPs it has become easier to track and address phishing.

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